Word: venter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Like many who live through a war, Venter returned a different man. He wanted to attend medical school and enrolled in community college and then at the University of California at San Diego. By graduation in 1972, he had become enamored of biochemistry and decided to pursue a graduate degree instead. He ended up taking a job with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington, walking the mazelike halls of the government building as a civil servant...
...nobody doubts that it is our DNA that determines what we are - in the same way that lines of code determine software or the digital etchings on a CD determine the music you hear. Etch new signals, and you write a new song. That, in genetic terms, is what Venter has done. Working with only the four basic nucleotides that make up all DNA - adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine - he has assembled an entirely new chromosome for an entirely new one-celled creature. Insert that genome into a cell - like inserting a disc into a computer - and a new species...
...That's not an overstatement. The genome in Venter's lab in Rockville, Md., could revolutionize genetics, introducing a new world order in which the alchemy of life is broken down into the ultimate engineering project. Man-made genomes could lead to new species that churn out drugs to treat disease, finely tuned vaccines that target just the right lethal bug, even cells that convert sunlight into a biofuel...
...Creating such small, single-purpose organisms is nowhere near as complex as creating larger, multicelled creatures - things with mobility, behavior, a purpose, a face. Those fanciful and frightful things are surely many years away and may prove too challenging and disturbing for society to allow. What Venter appears to have done, however, is crack the manufacturing code. Once you've done that, there may be little limit on what you can eventually build...
...always evident that Venter would become such a transformative figure - particularly when he was a boy. He was never a terribly engaged student (his 2007 autobiography, A Life Decoded, includes his eighth-grade report card, filled with Cs and Ds). He fondly recalls testing the patience of both his parents and the pilots at San Francisco International Airport when he and his friends, pedaling furiously on their bicycles, would race planes taxiing for takeoff on a remote runway. (Airport officials eventually fenced it off.) In 1967 he went to Vietnam, where he had been drafted to serve as a hospital...