He said He was Going to Do It, and Apparently He Did

CRAIG:  The human sequence is only the beginning.  Next we gotta do the chimp. it’ll be easy since it’s 90% the same as the human anyhow. 
      Then I want to shotgun everything in the human digestive tract; a cubic meter of Sargasso sea water, the Amazon rainforest, the entire globe.  I’ll take Sorcerer II and circumnavigate, shotgunning samples as I go.  There’s an infinity of questions to be asked, but we don’t even know the basics, like what friggin’ lives out there.
    I want to build an artificial genome from parts.  A whole new life form and see if we can make it work.  Doctor Frankenstein eat your heart out.

KELLIE:  Sounds like you might get that invite to Stockholm after all.

CRAIG:  Screw it.  They only give you a million dollars anyway.

KELLIE:  What would make you happy then?

CRAIG:  Happy?  If I could be the first to synthesize life, I’d be happy. . . for a while.

 

When I wrote those words five years ago,  I never doubted even then that Venter would accomplish his seemingly impossible goals.

J. Craig Venter is a playwright’s dream.  A real-life Faust, a gigantic brain attached to an even bigger mouth, a brilliant bio-tech Muhammad Ali.  It was a pleasure to build The Sequence around his race with Francis Collins to decode the human genome.  Now he’s apparently booted up a whole new life form from parts, just like he said he would, both in my play and in real life.

New York Times: “Researchers Say They Created a ‘Synthetic Cell’

 

Paper	Bits

Comments

[Bill Salyers]

Like I always said, you have a man-crush on Venter.

[Paul Mullin]

Okay, I'll cop to that, Salyers. But if I have a man-crush for him, what do I have going on for YOU!

[Bill Salyers]

Sweet, sweet love.