January 21, 2008 · 10:45 AM

Life: A Gene-Centric View

Author of this entry: Franziska Schwarz

Decoding the human DNA took disease research a large step ahead. But is it legitimate to interfere with the process of evolution?

J. Craig Venter is regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 21st centrury. He founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), where he and his team decoded the genome of the first free-living organism, using the new "whole genome shotgun technique".

Richard Dawkins ist the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. His recent book „The God Delusion" has sold more than a million and a half copies in English and is being published in 31 languages.

Venter starts with the thought that genes are the design proponents of the future.
Dawkins says that genes are part of information technology. There are many variations possible - perhaps even alternate ways to generate fuel or energy.

Venter says that some people think, with the rate at which CO2 rises into the atmosphere, that these processes are irreversible. Dawkins replies that he hopes these people are wrong, and one can perhaps solve this problem with the help of engineering biology.

Venter adds that people are taking millions of years of compressed biology and burning it into atmosphere. Now they are trying to reverse this process. Oil was cheap in the beginning and no one cared about it. But now this has changed. Venter then proposes a carbon tax to reduce the consumption of carbon, which is not renewable.

He then goes on to say that all evolution is based on selection, and that now we are close to deliberate evolution - people can create a limited version of Darwinian evolution. We can get a million changes in a species in an instant. He and his crew experiment with chromosomes transplantation from one species to another. Creating new chromosomes is like putting new software into a DVD player. They are trying to create this new software in the lab.

Dawkins then explains that many people get the concept of Darwinian evolution wrong: It is not that one species destroys another species and takes over - that would be extinction.

Venter adds that people expect one dominant species, but fact is that there are a lot of dependent organisms, which would never destroy each other.

There is a world of biology we live in but don't see: Millions of organisms, bacteria and viruses, in the sea and in the air. But these organisms are important for the metabolism of the world. Dawkins adds that the human gene pool is a huge society of viruses. The whole biosphere is an interaction between different, criss-crossing DNA.

Architect Richard Saul Wurman from the audience poses the question: So are we a zoo? Venter replies: "That depends on what you ate for breakfast!" (laughter in the audience) But we have more bacterial than human cells in the body. When one looks at it through a microscope, you indeed have a zoo.

Venter's conclusion is that life, under the current pace of innovation, becomes a form of technology.

 

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