How artificial life could change real businesses

    For years Craig Venter has attracted outsized attention and sometimes vitriol for challenging the status quo. Jealous scientific rivals have equated this maverick scientist, inventor and entrepreneur to Hitler, and Time magazine once described him as the "bad boy of science." Yours truly once compared him in a book to Dr. Faustus, the Renaissance physician who gave up his soul to the devil in exchange for receiving valuable scientific knowledge that incidentally made him rich and famous.

    In recent years, Venter's cockiness has mellowed, and so has the critic's sting as his achievements have piled up and his out-of-the-box thinking has become a mainstay in prestigious scientific journals and in meetings from Davos to TED. Yet his work still incites the sort of over-the-top reaction that is rare for a scientist, and causes presidents, popes, and barons of business to take notice.

    Last week, Venter and a team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego did it again when they revealed to the world a microbe brought to life by DNA they had painstakingly assembled in their lab. Venter described it in a press conference last week as: "the first self-replicating species we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer."

    The bacteria -- dubbed "Synthia" by Venter -- couldn't do much more than survive and reproduce. But the proof of concept was there for a synthetic bug that Venter says will one day be programmable to churn out new drugs, bioengineered fuels, and vaccines, among other things.

As important as the microchip?

    If true -- and there is no reason to think it's not -- this invention and others like it in the field of synthetic life could rival or surpass the invention of the internal combustion engine, or the microchip.

    This is because cells in many ways operate like highly complex computers that until now have been programmed primarily by nature to allow certain inputs (food, chemicals, sunlight) to cause reactions that include making other chemicals and proteins. Human manipulation of this process has been producing products such as the anti-anemia drug erythropoietin since the 1980s.

    Venter's method offers the promise for much more effective bioengineering -- which could be a force for good, but also could be dangerous if the technology falls into the wrong hands. Let's say a bioterrorist engineers a nefarious weapon, or, more likely, a bumbling scientist allows a bioengineered bug to get loose in the environment.

    Venter insists that safeguards can be designed into the manufacturing process of synthetic cells, and that chemicals used to make the cells can be controlled -- presumably like bomb-grade uranium is supposed to be controlled.

    The potential for harm caught the attention of President Obama last week.

    Shortly after Venter published the Synthia study in Science magazine, Obama asked his bioethics commission to complete a six-month study on synthetic biology. The President said Venter's announcement raised "genuine concerns," but did not offer specifics.

    Other reactions fell along predictable lines. Many scientists praised the Venter team for its ingenuity, while some insisted that there are less complicated ways to bioengineer organisms to make drugs and alternative fuels.

    Ethicists and some environmentalists worried about the bugs escaping and causing havoc or evolving in unpredictable ways that might prove dangerous.

Big Pharma's future

    Not surprisingly, the biotech, pharma, and energy industries were pleased, though I wonder if they realize that this discovery could lead to the same situation faced by the horse and buggy industry a little over a century ago at the dawn of the automobile age.