Last night I got to meet a man I’ve known for 10 years, albeit only in the very arcane and narrow way that a playwright can know one of his living subjects. In addition to being an actual living person, J. Craig Venter is a character in my play The Sequence, which dramatizes the real-life race to decode the human genome. Venter drove the private side of the race, while Francis Collins, now head of the NIH, drove the public side as then head of the Human Genome Project. Some years ago, I had the honor of meeting Dr. Collins at an early public reading of the play at George Mason University. He came late, sat in the last available seat, in the front row about eight feet from the actor playing him. It was the most nerve-wracking night of my life. But when the reading was over and the bows were taken, Collins graciously, spontaneously joined the post-play discussion. And at the reception after, Collins happily chatted with my all my friends, as well as my mom, brother and niece who had driven down from Maryland to attend. He later emailed me asking for a signed copy of the play to give his mother. Collins impressed me as a deeply affable and approachable person. Dr. Venter, however, proved more elusive—that is, until last night when I attended his lecture at Town Hall Seattle, at which he introduced his new book, Life at the Speed of Light, which details his recent efforts to “boot up” an artificial organism from DNA code “written” by his team.
I learned a lot of things last night. Here’s a sampling, in order of increasing “inside baseball” genome geekery:
“That dust in your house? That’s you!”
This direct quote from Venter came as he described how life is a constant process of renewing worn out proteins. If the trash doesn’t get removed, you wind up with some particularly nasty afflictions like Alzheimer’s and Mad Cow Disease
Life happens because of Brownian Motion.
Brownian Motion, the constant random motion of water molecules, theoretically confirmed by Albert Einstein, creates a turbulence within living cells with a force comparable to a Richter 9 earthquake. This constant agitation drives the enzymatic processes that allow life to exist and do all the cool things that life does. Brownian Motion is temperature and phase state-dependent, which is a fancy way of saying life requires water in a liquid state.
Biological teleportation is coming.
Instead of transporting organisms, we will beam their digital genomic code to far flung places, like disease control centers around the globe during a pandemic, or even farther, to places, like Mars. And conversely,when we do find life on Mars (for Venter it’s a “when” not an “if”) we will sequence it’s DNA in situ there, then beam back the digital code to earth so that the Martian life-form can be “printed” into terrestrial existence, for… ya know… further investigation.
Artificial life gets watermarked.
“We think it’s very important, when making a synthetic species, to mark the species as synthetic.” Gee, Craig. Ya think?! So Venter’s team inserted “watermarks” into the DNA of their artificial organism: widely recognizable English phrases consisting of quotes from James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman. Shortly after Venter’s team first published their results, they got a call from the Joyce estate demanding to know why permission hadn’t been sought.* My friend attending with me last night, who had also seen a reading of The Sequence at Seattle Public Theatre a few weeks ago, remarked how ironic it is that Venter should be so irked, when back in the 1990’s he was an outspoken advocate of gene patenting. As my buddy put it, “Intellectual property law can be a bitch.”
Artificial life needs kill-switches.
If (more likely when) we introduce human-designed organisms into the wide world beyond the laboratory, which we might do for any number of legitimate purposes — health care, food production, energy production, environmental clean-up, reversal of global warming, etc.— we are going to want to the means to – ahem—un-introduce them.
Venter became an amateur science historian.
In his lecture he frequently referenced the fairly obscure work of 18th and 19th Century scientists and thinkers, the ideas of whom he seems to have used for inspiration and guidance when sailing the uncharted seas of artificial life creation. As an amateur science historian myself, this charms me.
Venter and I share a fascination with a brilliant little book by the guy who gave us the “neither-dead-nor-alive” cat.
What is Life?, was published in 1944 by quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In it, nearly a decade before Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure and mechanisms, Schrodinger posited that the information processing required for the propagation of life might in fact be the result of a simple digital code. Some day I need to write an essay about “What is Life?” It’s an eminently accessible book for the lay reader, and in it Schrodinger goes on to posit theories much more outlandish than digital life. Indeed the entire book seems to point at a potentially universe-reversing conclusion that life might provide a powerful negating counter-punch to the seemingly unbreakable 2nd Law of Thermo-dynamics, such that entropy may not, in fact, have the final word that we have all been taught it must.
Not even scientists get to fudge history.
Both Venter, and the comparable genius who introduced him, the University of Washington’s own Leroy Hood, worked hard at times last night to needlessly and speciously burnish Venter’s legacy. For instance, Hood asserted in his introduction that Venter made his company Celera’s work product freely available during the genome race as a reference for competitors, like Collins’ team at HGP, who were also attempting to read every one of the 3 billion letters of the genome. In fact the opposite was true. The public side HGP data was used by Celera to double-check its enormously long, but doubtfully accurate sequences. (The “Shotgun” sequencing technique which Venter developed was fast, but sloppy.) Celera held their sequences under wraps as private and proprietary information which they hoped to sell in a paid subscription model like Bloomberg Professional Services. That plan never came to fruition.
Venter’s DNA was not God’s gift to humanity.
After getting fired from Celera, the company he founded, Venter publically released the bombshell news that the genome sample the company sequenced was not, as it should have been, from a randomly selected anonymous donor but rather from Venter himself. He had snuck his own DNA into the lab at the very beginning of the process. Last night Lee Hood maintained that Venter’s bizarre action has been widely praised in the scientific community and beyond, when in fact, it is almost universally viewed as an ethically questionable stunt of astounding hubris.
Venter was against junk DNA before he was for it.
Junk DNA is one of the great mysteries of biology. Over 98% of the human genome is noncoding DNA, meaning it doesn’t get translated into proteins. It just sits there, doing what? Maybe nothing. When asked a question about junk DNA last night, Venter said he had always argued against a commonly held notion that junk DNA has little value; but actually back at his first company TIGR, he was indeed dismissive of junk DNA. Here’s a snippet from early in The Sequence, before Craig decides to join the genome race:
KELLIE: So tell me. Why is it so important to sequence the human genome?
CRAIG: It’s not.
KELLIE: It’s not?
CRAIG: No. 95 percent of it is junk. I’m only interested in the five percent that does something. The sequences that make up genes. I don’t care if we ever sequence the other stuff.
Nitpicking aside, I had a delightful evening. If nothing else, seeing Venter up close and personal helped reassure me that I had gotten him right in The Sequence, capturing his brash confidence and brilliance, his impatient pursuit of achievement.
My play is at least a blip on Venter’s radar.
Upon the lecture’s conclusion, I bought Life at the Speed of Light and stood in line to have Venter sign it. I had also brought along a copy of The Sequence which I personalized to him during the lecture. “For J. Craig Venter. Thank you for driving this amazing story, and this astounding achievement in human history. ” When it was my turn to get my book signed I said, “Dr. Venter, my name is Paul Mullin and I wrote this play about you.” I handed him the script along with his book to sign.
“Oh, so you’re the guy,” he said.
“Yes. I am the guy.”
We smiled at each other and shook hands.
“Can I make changes to this?” he jokingly asked.
“Sure,” I countered “Mark it up and sent it back to me.” I wasn’t really joking.
Then he signed my book and we wished each other well. Alas, I didn’t get a picture. Maybe next time.
*The quote was from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” I could’ve have told them that Joyce’s people are notoriously stingy with permissions. The issue is now moot, however, since most of Joyce’s major works fell into public domain on January 1, 2012. Thank goodness!
