Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life - Hardcover

Venter, J. Craig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670025402 ISBN 13: 9780670025404

Publisher: Viking, 2013

Synopsis

The renowned scientist and author of A Life Decoded examines the creation of life in the field of synthetic genomics.

About this title

About the Author

J. Craig Venter is best known for sequencing the human genome. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a not-for-profit research organization dedicated to genomic research. He is also the founder and CEO of Synthetic Genomics, Inc., as well as the author of A Life Decoded. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, including the 2008 United States National Medal of Science, and twice been named one Time's 100 most influential people. He lives in La Jolla, California. Visit jcvi.org.

Reviews

Venter (A Life Decoded), a field giant of genetics, makes a persuasive case that synthetic biology will help us understand, appreciate, and improve our own biology. The impatient genius who arrogantly raced the U.S. government to sequence the human genome, Venter scores many firsts in this emerging field, including the creation—nearly from scratch—of the first synthetic bacterium. It was not a pure first, as he used cytoplasm from an existing cell to boot up his synthetic genome—which only deviated slightly from the genome of an existing bacterium. But it&'s a major coup; Venter&'s synthetic genome successfully instructed the cell to create living proteins. We can now change the software of life, which then changes its own hardware, as it were. Venter shares spellbinding stories from the frontiers of genomics—researchers creating living toolboxes out of mechanisms co-opted from varied life forms. For the wary, he notes nature itself mixes and matches species-specific mechanisms: our own mitochondria were once bacteria engulfed by, and incorporated into, our cells. Gene engineering opens new portals of life-designing potential, he argues, and he champions ethics reviews of such work. Venter instills awe for biology as it is, and as it might become in our hands. Agent: John Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Nov.)

When scientists finally succeed in transmitting to another galaxy the digital instructions for building a living organism, they will rely on science that Venter has pioneered. To understand the groundbreaking work Venter has done, however, readers must revisit Hooke’s seventeenth-century discovery of the cell as the primary structure of life and must peer into an anticipated future of teleportation via quantum entanglement. But the narrative largely focuses on the twentieth-century research fulfilling physicist Schrödinger’s hopes of finding the key of life in a biochemical aperiodic crystal. In particular, readers see how the double helix that Watson and Crick first recognized in DNA 60 years ago has become an adaptable scaffold for genetic engineers wielding potent pools for creating new life-forms. Readers will marvel at the potential that genetic engineering holds for making food, purifying water, generating energy, and curing diseases. Though they may wish to consult other sources to explore the philosophical and ethical issues he raises, readers will thank Venter for an insider’s perspective on epoch-making science. --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670025402
• ISBN 13: 9780670025404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240