Dr. J. Craig
Venter, the scientist who developed the “shotgun
sequencing” method for mapping genetic codes, which allowed
the basic coding of the human genome to be known years before
most of the scientific world had expected, recently came through
Panama. Venter’s great discovery was of unique
“tags” in the DNA of every species that allow it to be
broken up, pulled out of a mix with matter from other organisms
(with, for example, the germs that inhabit the human body), and
be mathematically reassembled in sequential code.
The co-author of
“The Human Genome” (along with his wife, Dr. Claire
Fraser) is now traveling around the world on a boat named
Sorcerer II, taking seawater samples, straining out the microbes
and sending the catch back to the lab for analysis of the DNA so
captured.
This voyage of
discovery, which began in the Canadian Maritimes, is what
brought him to Panama. While here he took the opportunity to
speak at the Tupper Center in Ancon, in an auditorium packed
with Panamanian scientists and university students, many
listening on headphones to the simultaneous translation.
The
“shakedown cruise” for this circumnavigation took
place in the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda, in the calm and weedy
waters of the Sargasso Sea. Just from samples taken in different
parts of that relatively small region of our water planet, he
rather quickly discovered that the ocean is not the
“homogeneous soup” of microbial life that some may
have suspected. His team found “on the order of 1.3 million
new genes,” many of them “totally different from
anything that has been seen before,” which when fully
analyzed and duly considered may “give us a very different
view of life.”
Maybe the
biggest surprise was the discovery of hundreds of new
photoreceptor genes, not only those that create food from light
via photosynthesis. “Sunlight has been the richest source
of biological energy on our planet for a long time,” Venter
pointed out.
Might the
identification of these genes, and their inclusion in a database
that’s available to the public, lead to more efficient
solar energy devices? That’s one of many potential
applications of the basic science that Venter is studying, and
but one of the reasons why the US Department of Energy finances
some of the research at the network of non-profit scientific
institutions that he has set up. The DOE is also interested in
things like genetically engineered microbes that eat and break
down the oil spilled in tanker accidents, and using tiny
organisms to cheaply produce hydrogen that can be burned as a
clean fuel.
Some of the
other applications of DNA sequencing are a meningitis vaccine
now under development and the search for the source and
disseminator of the anthrax used in the 2001 infected mail
attacks on the United States. “The work has a lot of
implications for medicine, for bio-remediation, for energy
production” and things not even thought about at the
moment, Venter pointed out.
Scientific
research in Venter’s field also has vast social
implications, and not only in academia and industry.
Having made his
most revolutionary discoveries about genetic sequence tags and
their useful application to DNA analysis while working for the
US National Institutes of Health, where he was a section chief
and then head of the lab at the National Institute of
Neurological Disorders and Stroke, he left in 1992 to found The
Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), a private non-profit
research institute. Six years later, he was co-founder of Celera
Genomics, a private company that went on to beat a consortium of
scientists who had public funding in the race to map the human
genome. Given the rivalries inherent in that race, it is no
surprise that Venter picked up a crowd of detractors in industry
and academia.
That fame of
mapping the human genome brought tremendous investment in the
company during the heady days of the tech stock boom. All of a
sudden Celera had a $14 billion capitalization, but nothing to
match that in terms of a product to sell. Venter thought it a
case of market madness and wasn’t disposed to come up with
new hype to keep the bubble growing and the financiers happy,
and ended up getting fired by his own company. That was one of
the many times his work has led him to face ethical and social
issues.
Venter’s
work on the human genome led him to note that the genetic
differences between mankind’s races are so trivial as to be
negligible, something that Nazis and social Darwinists
don’t want to hear. At the Tupper Center he warned against
misapplied conceptions of human genetics, maintaining that while
genes determine our physical attributes, people are very
adaptable creatures.
He also noted
his advocacy of legislation now before the US Congress to block
insurance companies and employers from using DNA as a basis for
discrimination, for example by refusing jobs or insurance
coverage to someone with an hereditary vulnerability to cancer.
He pointed out that privacy concerns vary from country to
country along with their social systems, noting that genetic
privacy is an important issue for Americans, who have mainly
private health and insurance systems, but not such a hot button
in Canada, where these institutions are more socialized.
Then there is
the ethical and business concern about public access to
scientific data. While Venter’s network of non-profit
research institutions is not swearing off its copyrights and
patents, it is committed to providing public access to its data.
And moreover, in a series of interviews he gave with business
publications, Venter insists that in the long run the
development of genetics will depend upon the profitability of
its applications. Thus, even though his experience with Celera
was bittersweet, he doesn’t rule out further forays into
and alliances with the for-profit private sector.
Venter’s
immediate future has him sailing across the Pacific to take
water and microbe samples, then on to the Indian Ocean, around
Africa and back to North America. The future of genomics is
harder to predict, and not his alone. He does expect, however,
that within the lifetime of most of the people in the audience
at the Tupper Center “we will know the precise evolutionary
events that made us human.”
Venter has good
and bad news for the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute’s regular crowd, composed primarily of
biologists. “Genomics keep telling us how little we know
about biology,” Venter said. That may be taken as quite the
humbling message, and hold within it the risk that some
biologists’ long-pursued avenues of research may be shown
to be dead ends. But then it also means that there will be
plenty of work in the field for a long time to come.
Also in this
section:
Genome pioneer J. Craig
Venter speaks in Panama
Putting the causes of
Amazonia's deforestation in perspective
Long distance dispersal of
species
Mussel glue
Gene-spliced crops use more
pesticides
