Craig Venter, rest in peace.

Craig Venter

Craig Venter died on April 29, less than six months shy of his 80th birthday. This biologist revolutionized genomics research with two major achievements:

·         Deciphering the human genome. The Human Genome Project, whose scientific director was Francis Collins, was launched in 1990 by a multinational consortium with huge funding and the support of several governments. Its goal was to decipher in 15 years all the genes in human DNA. In 1998, eight years later, Craig Venter founded Celera Corporation and decided to apply the shotgun sequencing method, which he had developed, to decipher the human genome in parallel with the Human Genome Project, but much faster and with far less funding. His efforts culminated successfully, as in 2000 Venter and Collins jointly announced the success of both projects, several years ahead of schedule, and presented partial results, which were completed in 2003.

Between 2003 and 2010, Venter, at the Institute for Genomic Research, which he also founded, investigated the field of synthetic life, to which I dedicated two posts in this blog in 2020: Synthetic Life, When? and Synthetic Life: Near or Far? Here is a summary of the advances Venter made in that field during those seven years:

·         2003, first artificial DNA, of the ϕχ174 virus, which was also the first genome to be sequenced in 1976.

·         2007, first synthetic bacterial DNA, that of Mycoplasma genitalium, with more than half a million nucleotides and 480 genes.

·         2007, first change of bacterial species. Venter and his team extracted DNA from the bacterium Mycoplasma capricolum and replaced it with DNA extracted from a specimen of Mycoplasma mycoides, a very similar species. The resulting cell continued reproducing as if it belonged to the second species.

·         2010, first bacterium with synthetic DNA. The DNA of Mycoplasma mycoides was synthesized, with some modifications, and the synthetic DNA was introduced into a cell of Mycoplasma capricolum, as in the previous case. Among the modifications were a gene to give the bacterium a blue color and make it easy to identify, and a suicide gene, so that if any specimen of the new bacterium escaped the control of the researchers, it could not reproduce indefinitely living freely. The new bacterial strain was considered a new species, which was given the name Mycoplasma laboratorium.

After this string of achievements, Venter wrote a book, Life at the Speed ​​of Light, published in 2015, where he announced spectacular new advances in the field of synthetic life, which would lead to the creation of fully artificial living beings by 2030. Since then, Venter's team has not achieved significant progress, although other teams have managed to construct a version of Escherichia coli that uses a reduced genetic code of only 59 codons, rather than the 64 used by all living beings.

But the advances that Venter predicted have not materialized, and the deadline he proposed (2030) is now approaching. As in other cases, this would be an example of the horizon effect: As soon as a significant scientific advance occurs, there is a lot of hype and announcements of spectacular new advances, which rarely come to happen. We are probably experiencing a similar situation now in relation to the field of “artificial intelligence.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic thread on synthetic and artificial life: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca