Igniting a Genomic Revolution

Debra Kain | March 24, 2008

Craig Venter, founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute and UCSD alum.

For more than two decades, J. Craig Venter — a name nearly synonymous with the Human Genome project — has been a leading pioneer in genomic research.  In 2007, Venter was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

On March 20, Venter presented his vision of the future of synthetic biology and designer organisms to an audience of about 500 area scientists and biotech industry leaders in a talk sponsored by BIOCOM, CONNECT and Clean Tech of San Diego.  He remarked that it felt like “closing a big circle” to be back speaking on UC San Diego’s Health Sciences campus, where he earned doctoral degrees in physiology and pharmacology.

Venter recalled that Palmer Taylor, now dean of the Skaggs School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, was a new assistant professor in pharmacology at the time. Taylor’s wife, Susan, a professor of pharmacology in the School of Medicine, was one of Venter’s fellow post-doctoral students in Nate Kaplan’s lab.

Venter presented a lecture, “Genomics on a Grand Scale: New Energy Sources” on March 20 in the Health Science Education Center auditorium at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Synthetic Genomics, a firm Venter co-founded in 2005, is dedicated to using modified microorganisms to produce ethanol and hydrogen as alternative fuels, fuels with properties that are superior to traditional biofuels.  For example, they are producing designer fuels based on using carbon dioxide as a source of carbon energy.  His research team is applying tools and techniques developed in the quest to map the human genome to “digitalize biology”— decoding the genes of microbes in order to enable scientists to synthetically recreate chromosomes. Through these discoveries, they seek to create a range of organisms that will reduce the world’s dependency on fossils fuels and act as a new class of anti-parasitic drugs.

“The field of synthetic genomics presents an enormous opportunity for good — carbon-neutral energy sources, environmental remediation, and new pharmaceuticals to improve the human condition,”  Venter said. “Given our team’s longstanding history of pioneering science, we are uniquely positioned to ignite a biological industrial revolution.”

The ability to construct synthetic genomes may lead to extraordinary advances in our ability to engineer microorganisms for many vital energy and environmental purposes."
- J. Craig Venter, 2003