Team Venter making history

biomimicry, by jude buffum

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already— life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made.

From George Dyson's introduction to A short course on synthetic genomics [July, 2009, Edge Masterclass], presented by Craig Venter and George Church. Videos [mostly difficult for me to understand on one watch] and a pdf from an earlier, related event, at the link

Richard Dawkins interviews Venter [2008, BBC], touring his lab. Much easier.

Homo evolutus

Juan Enrinquez works with Craig Venter. In this talk at TED 2009, he starts off by giving a fairly right-wing assessment of the economic crisis, then moves on to describing the current and near future state of the art in engineering microbes, tissues and robots. The word isn't said, but it's verging on soft take-off Singularity stuff. The cool thing comes in the last third when he draws out the implications. Now, other speakers and writers always cover the last part along the lines of everything will be awesome, without specifying awesome for who. Enriquez states the obvious, unapologetically. One slide in his presentation shows how in our recent evolutionary history is was more common than not for different species of hominid to live at the same time, and he looks forward to next one to share the stage with homo sapiens, homo evolutus - the rich becoming superheroes. It's an interesting talk.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the logarithmic graph of 15 separate lists of paradigm shifts for key events in human history show an exponential trend. Lists prepared by, among others, Carl Sagan, Paul D. Boyer, Encyclopædia Britannica, American Museum of Natural History and University of Arizona; compiled by Kurzweil.

Wikipedia

Related posts on this site:
Venter speaking at the Long Now, 2008

Intractability vs Evolution

On the train to Taipei listened to an interesting talk about algorithms in nature from Princetown's lunch'n'learn series, which tied up various things that have been floating through my head. In brief, there are certain problems, such as folding proteins, that for humans [and their computers] seem to be intractable, but for nature are easy, instantly done.

Rudy Rucker maintains that everything is computation, that when the wind hits trees reality is the result of calculations that takes place.

Craig Venter is not trying to make something entirely new, but rather to find / decode what nature has produced and then to put the parts together in a different way.


The world has been evolving for a long time, and nature is really, really smart. It knows what works, it gets things done.

The planet will save itself

The planet will save itself. This is the underlying message of Lovelock's Gaia, that the biosphere itself will force us to adapt or die, but that it's under no great threat, no greater than any it's faced in the past. The rallying cry of environmentalism is something along the lines of 'humans vs nature', but that miscasts the thing. Humans can never win against nature. We're part of it, and can only adapt to its changing terms.

Listening to Craig Venter from my last post, and it's clear that the bulk of the genetic diversity on the planet- and I guess the bulk of living material - is invisible to the naked eye. The plants and the animals are nice, but they're not the thing itself. No matter what we do or don't, life will continue to thrive. So the notion of us protecting the planet is rather misguided, as it's going to do just fine, with or without us, the whales, the spotted owl, whatever. DNA is tough, it's one instinct is to thrive.

Our concern is a little like an ant colony worrying it's going to kill the householders it's stealing from. The colony will get rooted out way before it goes that far.

When it comes to protecting the environment, the species it matters most to is us.

Venter at the Long Now

It's almost redundant to express amazement at another talk from the Long Now Foundation. Hardly any of them, amassing here, are duds.

This is the first time I've heard Craig Venter speak, and he's great, perhaps the best talk I've heard since...well, probably only since Vernor Vinge, but then he set a high standard. Venter will make your head glow, there's so much cool stuff. Listened to it while cycling out to the country, with the picture of the fractal / broken wall, above, and the network of roots, below, two of the sights, but some notes on the talk from a 7/11 stop:

- Using genes as software for cell's hardware - software that can produce its own hardware.
- The huge variety of undiscovered (microscopic) lifeforms in the oceans and deep (1km +) underground.
- Life in the Sargasso Sea feeding on sunlight, but not by photosynthesis.
- Lifeforms that can be dried out, cut up, hit with high radiation for tens of thousands / millions of years and then recombine and live again when put in water - your basic panspermia seed.