Craig Venter, Synthetic Biologist

By: Christopher

Craig Venter is, without a doubt, the leading scientist alive. Due to his recent accomplishments, people even outside of the scientific community have heard of him, but they are often misinformed on his work. This is an attempt to give credit to what Venter has truly accomplished, and eradicate false ideas regarding his discoveries.

Venter's first great achievement was sequencing the human genome. Although this accomplishment is not the subject of this post, its story is relevant to understanding Craig Venter. In the 1990s, the US government was funding a 10 year study to sequence the human genome. Without going into the science, the method that was being used was slow, expensive, and inaccurate, so Venter stepped in and sequenced his own genome with a shorter timeline.

The reason Venter is going to win the Nobel prize though, is not for sequencing the first genome, but for another accomplishment, and subject of many news headlines from last summer:

"Scientist Craig Venter Creates Life for the First Time in Laboratory"

While his accomplishment is remarkable, it is often misunderstood because of inaccurate headlines such as the one shown above. Venter did not create life, or a synthetic organism, like most newspaper articles argue. Instead, Venter claims to have created a synthetic genome.

In his Science publication entitled, Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Synthetic Genome, Venter describes his elegant protocol for synthesizing a genome. He took the known genome of a bacteria and tweaked it on a computer. Once a genome had been constructed on a computer, he devised a technique to construct a chromosome containing the genome. This construction of an artificial genome based off of a bacterial genome is Venter's true accomplishment; he synthesized a genome containing all the genes necessary for life using chemicals that anyone can purchase.

The distinction must be made though, that Venter synthesized a genome, not life. The reason he did not create life is because a genome, by itself, is not living. If you put a genome in a pool of nutrients, it will just float around and break down over time. To self-replicate, a genome needs much more than the DNA that Venter constructed. It needs proteins, lipids, and other cellular components, which Venter did not create. Instead, Venter put his genome into a cell from a living organism. This cell (although it had its original genome removed) had all of the components necessary to self-replicate and become life once Venter added his synthetic genome. Venter merely added the final component to revive a cell that was once living.

Finally, the applications of creating synthetic life are often overstated or misunderstood. Venter and others argue that we can now program bacteria to do useful things for the world (such as break down trash, produce drugs, etc). While this is true, creating a organism with a synthetic genome is an expensive project to accomplish something that we can already do. It is already very efficient and inexpensive to program bacteria to accomplish tasks for us, without creating their entire genome from scratch. Scientists currently add additional genes to bacteria that contain already functional genomes. This process has been going on for decades and is how insulin and most antibiotics are made.

Venter's accomplishment is monumental and should not be diminished just because it does not live up to the false headlines. Venter successfully created a chromosome far larger than anyone has constructed in the past. Additionally, and most importantly, he created the first genome that contains all the necessary genes for life. While this project is still decades away from creating life, it is still Nobel Prize worthy, as we will see within the next decade.