J. CRAIG VENTER: THE BIOLOGICAL-DIGITAL CONVERTER, OR, BIOLOGY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT @ THE EDGE DINNER IN TURIN
From Edge:
...AFTER-DINNER TALK
We can now send biology at the speed of light, and this is one of
the implications of our work, which we recorded two years ago making the
first synthetic life form. We completely synthesized the genetic code
of a cell starting with a digital code in the computer—it's the ultimate
interface between computers and biology. The digital code and the
genetic code have a lot in common; something Schrodinger pointed out in
1943, saying it could be something as simple as the Morse code.
... Digital code, as you know, is a binary code, and ones and zeroes,
and your genetic code is literally four-base code with ACGs and Ts. We
can now readily convert in between the two, and we can define life at
its most basic level. Things that were a mystery fifty, sixty, seventy
years ago, we now understand completely.
THE BIOLOGICAL-DIGITAL CONVERTER:
BIOLOGY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT
A Talk by J. Craig Venter
THE BIOLOGICAL-DIGITAL CONVERTER —OR—BIOLOGY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT
J. CRAIG VENTER: These are exciting and challenging times for science
and society. If you look at the practical side of things, in the next 11
years we're going to add a billion people to the planet, so basically
the equivalent of China being added in 11 years, and 12 years after that
we're going to add another billion people. Last October we just passed
the 7 billion mark, and that took 12 years to happen from 6 billion. In
the 1800s it took well over 100 years to go from 1 to 2 billion people.
We're in a unique time in history where there are more people alive than
have ever existed in human history, and we keep expanding tremendously,
and exhausting the resources of the planet.
There are a number of things that come into play here. We've been
doing everything from trying to understand the human genome, and human
genetic inheritance, and we have teams that are doing some of the first
genomes of early populations in Africa and have traced down actually the
oldest populations in Southern Africa that we all have evolved from,
from groups that migrated out of Africa. It turns out I have a Northern
European ancestry primarily, and so we probably all share this. My
ancestors, and probably most of yours found Neanderthals attractive and
mated with them. And so what was thought to not be any coexistence, we
now ... 3 to 4 percent of my genome is Neanderthal-derived. My friend,
Bill Clinton, when we shared an honor a couple of years ago, told me he
learned that he was 3 percent Neanderthal, and that explained all his
problems while in office.
We're learning about our own history, our own migrations, but we have
to do something different for the future. A major producer once argued
that we have two hopes for humanity, one is to be able to populate
distant planets, and the other is to alter our genetic code so we can
survive in a very deteriorated environment here on the planet.
We're working on both, and there are some exciting changes. Science is
changing things very quickly. Think about how the Internet has changed
all of our lives in the last decade or so. I assume most people here
have an iPad, and that's three years old, barely? And it's hard to
imagine life without an iPad in our culture. But very soon we're going
to be able to send something else across the Internet. We can now send
biology at the speed of light, and this is one of the implications of
our work, which we recorded two years ago making the first synthetic
life form. We completely synthesized the genetic code of a cell starting
with a digital code in the computer—it's the ultimate interface between
computers and biology. The digital code and the genetic code have a lot
in common; something Schrodinger pointed out in 1943, saying it could
be something as simple as the Morse code.
Digital code, as you know, is a binary code, and ones and zeroes, and
your genetic code is literally four-base code with ACGs and Ts. We can
now readily convert in between the two, and we can define life at its
most basic level. Things that were a mystery fifty, sixty, seventy years
ago, we now understand completely.
We know what a cell is, know that all the components, all the proteins
in the cell are miniature robots. They don't have a brain, they don't
have a soul, they have a structure that defines their function, and
their structure is determined by the genetic code, which defines the
linear code of the protein, which determines how it folds, how it
functions, and how stable it is. You don't feel it sitting there, but
every one of your 100 trillion cells is rapidly metabolizing proteins.
Your proteins have a half-life between a few seconds and ten or twenty
hours. You don't know that you're sloughing 500 billion skin cells a
day. All that dust you find around your houses, in your apartments?
That's you, little bits of you. You turn over your entire skin every two
to three weeks. Biology is a constant state of renewal, and it's a
software-driven state of renewal. Take the DNA out of the cell, and the
cell dies. In fact, that's why radiation kills people. It disrupts the
genetic code, breaks it up, and people die because all the proteins
degrade very quickly....MUCH MORE
