The Meaning of Life

According to Geneticist J. Craig Venter

By Catherine Mayer, TIME, Tuesday, July 17, 2012

J. Craig Venter talks with Li Ma, the scientist who made the initial transfers of synthetic cell materials at the J. Craig Venter Institute.

Eli Meir Kaplan / The Washington Post / Getty Images

On the evening of July 12, Ireland’s Enda Kenny, the Prime Minister — or Taioseach, in the proper Gaelic — was running late, delayed a few minutes by affairs of state. The 400-strong audience, squeezed onto rows of doll-size chairs in the Examination Hall of Trinity College, Dublin, waited placidly. What, after all, did a few minutes matter, when the scientific world had waited almost 70 years for an event of this magnitude?

In 1943, the Austrian-born physicist Erwin Schrödinger delivered a lecture at Trinity applying the principles of his own field to the foreign territory of biology. His purpose was to tackle the biggest question of all: what is life? He told his audience of 400, among them the then-Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, that the filaments in cells called chromosomes must contain "some kind of code-script" determining "the entire pattern of the individual’s future development." This hypothesis would inspire the scientists James D. Watson and Francis Crick to seek that code-script. A mere decade later, they published a revolutionary article describing the double helix structure of what we now familiarly call DNA, explaining how it stores hereditary information. Their discovery underpins all modern genetics.

(LIST: Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs of 2011)

The idea of restaging Schrödinger’s momentous lecture for a 21st century audience arose after Dublin won the right to host the 2012 Euroscience Open Forum, a privilege Ireland’s Chief Scientific Advisor Prof. Patrick Cunningham compares to securing the Olympics for the Irish capital. TIME reported on the original lecture in its April 5, 1943 issue. "Only in the precarious peace of Eire could Europe today provide such a spectacle," our un-bylined reporter wrote. "At Dublin’s Trinity College last month crowds were turned away from a jampacked scientific lecture. Cabinet ministers, diplomats, scholars and socialites loudly applauded a slight, Vienna-born professor of physics."

The time and the place of Schrödinger’s talk — not to mention the international coverage it received — is important to Dubliners even today. "One of the things that’s quite remarkable for us," says Cunningham, "is that in middle of the war, on the fringes of Europe, a magazine operating in the U.S. thought that this was something of sufficient consequence to write about it."

But how to find a modern scientist willing to tackle again a theme of such blinding magnitude? Who’d be prepared to endure comparison with the legendary Schrödinger — and not worry about the hubris of doing so? Which egghead possessed the intellectual capacity to give such a lecture and the communication skills to make its content accessible to the public?

Step up to the podium J. Craig Venter, the American geneticist who sparked the race to map the human genome and, despite a White House-brokered deal in 2000 to declare his small, private team and the government-funded Human Genome Project joint winners, is widely acknowledged to have edged out his competition. Ten years later, Venter announced an achievement that by his own estimation makes mapping the human genome "pale by comparison." He created synthetic life in a laboratory, by building the genome of a bacterium and inserting it into an existing host cell that had been stripped of its original DNA.

(MORE: Scientists Decode an Unborn Baby’s DNA. Is It Cause for Celebration — or Alarm?)

He told this tale during his own What Is Life? lecture, recounting how he watermarked the genome in order to demonstrate that the colony of bright blue bacteria multiplying in Petri dishes was indeed following the genetic instructions Venter had written. It would be hard to argue otherwise given that each new cell carried identifying codes that included Venter’s name and a series of three quotes — one from Dublin’s famous son, James Joyce: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life." The Joyce estate, learning of this unusual use of the author’s work, protested that Venter had not asked permission.

Venter has often elicited hostile responses, not least from within the scientific community. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel prize for his groundbreaking work on DNA, attacked Venter’s first successes at using an automated process to sequence genomes quickly. The sequencing machines, he sniffed, "could be run by monkeys." The distinguished science journalist John Horgan, writing on Scientific American’s Cross-check blog, described Venter as "the Lady Gaga of science. Like her, he is a drama queen, an over-the-top performance artist with a genius for self-promotion," and dismissed Venter’s synthetic bacteria as "just another incremental step in the human manipulation of life." A profile in Forbes by Matthew Herper, dubbed Venter "the Bono of genetics," sniping that "he warps the reality field around genetic research through sheer force of ego and showmanship."

And yet Venter endures. Say what you will about his synthetic bacterium, no one else has achieved such a feat. And he is pressing on with other projects, more recently engineering a type of algae that is yellow rather than dark green, enabling light to pass through it so it can grow in greater density — providing what he hopes will be an ideal raw material for biofuel.

A few hours before his lecture, the Bono of genetics sat down with TIME in Dublin’s Clarence Hotel, which is co-owned by the Bono of U2. Stocky like the Irish musician and with a rock star’s predilection for fast motors and private yachts, Venter in some respects lives up to his flamboyant reputation. But just as with the cell structures that are his obsession, the more closely you study him, the more evident his complexities become.

(MORE: DNA Evidence Confirms Humans and Neanderthals Mated)

A perennial outsider — "a rebellious attitude has probably been the most beneficial, although painful at times, trait in my life," he confesses — he never worked comfortably within the scientific establishment. That, however, can sometimes be a good thing. He came away from a stint at the U.S. National Institutes of Health with some hard insights into the failings of taxpayer-funded institutions and projects. "Given the science budget that exists, we should all be upset that far more hasn’t been achieved," he remarks. He also takes a swipe at the U.S. education system, which he says focuses too heavily on good grades (he was a C-student) and so "weeds out a lot of the creativity in the human population."

There are occasional swipes at his critics too. ("I’d rather continue what I’m doing and being able to do high-end science, than if I’d gotten a Nobel Prize 50 years ago and basically retired," he says, answering a question about whether he harbors ambitions to win the prize that has eluded him — but was awarded to Watson precisely 50 years back.) Nonetheless, the quality that is most striking about Venter is his belief in the power of science to transform the world for the better, not least by solving the resource shortages that science, by allowing greater numbers of humans to live longer, helped to create in the first place.

"Optimists are the ones that get things done," he says. "Because, in science, if you’re not optimistic about the outcome then you’ll never do the experiment. Pessimists talk themselves out of doing the experiment, and therefore don’t make any progress."

Progress is Venter’s grail and he’s impatient with the people and "prejudices" that slow progress, such as the once-widespread assumption that protein was what carried the code in genetic material. Venter himself is driven by another kind of code-script. Again like Bono, he’s a latter-day missionary, with elements of self aggrandizement, yes, but also creative impulses and curiosity and even, say it softly, humanitarianism. He may enjoy his fame-cum-notoriety, but he also sees it as a way to get his message across. And he isn’t interested in a closed conversation with other scientists. "The obligation to explain science to the public [is] an absolute, essential part of being a scientist," he says.

And so Venter accepted the challenge to follow in Schrödinger’s footsteps, knowing the lecture at Trinity would be live-streamed and blogged and reported more widely than any ordinary academic talk. He shared with this massively expanded audience his overview of the breakthroughs that, since Schrödinger bestrode the same podium, he believes to be transformational. There is the concept of "digitizing biology" for one, uploading the details of genetic codes and sending them via computers, making possible, for example, the rapid manufacture of vaccines at the point of outbreak of an epidemic. There is the effort to synthesize every part of a cell, something that Venter and multiple other scientists are exploring. Venter also ventured to give a scientific answer to the question posed by the title of the lecture: "All living cells that we know of on this planet are DNA software — driven biological machines comprised of hundreds of thousands of protein robots, coded for by the DNA, that carry out precise functions."

During the lecture, Venter’s old adversary Watson, now 84 and in Dublin for the Euroscience Open Forum, sat in the audience, next to Taoiseach Kenny. After Venter concluded, Watson climbed slowly on to the stage, shook his hand and congratulated him on "a beautiful speech." Did he mean it? Did he not? Only he knows. Venter may be right that scientists will soon be able to create life, but we may be no closer to understanding it — especially the human kind.

MORE: People Who Mattered: J. Craig Venter

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J. Craig Venter Talks Life, Ego, Ambition — and Frankenstein

By Catherine Mayer Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Biologist J. Craig Venter poses at his home in Alexandria, Va. on July 1, 2005.

Nearly 70 years ago, the famed Austria-born physicist Erwin Schrödinger — he of the maybe-dead cat — delivered a lecture at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The title of the talk, "What Is Life?" was as remarkable as the time and place it was delivered — at the fringes of war-torn Europe in the spring of 1943. A TIME reporter was there, writing in our April 5, 1943 issue that "Cabinet ministers, diplomats, scholars and socialites loudly applauded a slight, Vienna-born professor of physics [who] has gone beyond the ambitions of any other mathematician."

Now, the equally ambitious J. Craig Venter — he of human genome fame — has retuned to the same celebrated venue to tackle the same ambitious topic. TIME was there again, this time in the person of Catherine Mayer, who sat down with Venter before his talk to discuss biology, policy, ambition, ego, the Nobel Prize and, yes, Frankenstein.

(MORE: J. Craig Venter: Gene Mapper)

TIME:
In 1943 Erwin Schrödinger gave a lecture called What Is Life? at Trinity College, Dublin. Later today you’ll give a lecture called What Is Life? at Trinity College, Dublin. An homage?

Venter:
I’m not a Schrödinger scholar, I’m a Schrödinger fan. Why are we celebrating Schrödinger and biology when he was a physicist? It’s because his predictions were right, for the most part. A lot has happened in 70 years, and so I’m trying to show that modern science has answered most if not all the questions he was asking.

TIME:
Still, you’ve sometimes appeared frustrated by how little has happened in that time.

Venter:
Given the science budget that exists, we should all be upset. Also, science like any field is driven by prejudice. The discovery of DNA, the genetic material, could have happened 50 years sooner if it hadn’t been for the bias and prejudice. People thought that proteins are so much more complex, therefore they have to be the genetic material.

TIME:
How important do you think Schrodinger’s lecture series actually was?

Venter:
He spoke in a clear, understandable fashion, explaining very complex concepts in a way that people could grasp. That’s so underrated in science, but it’s so important. [Schrodinger] was apparently very good at it. In the cells, he was showing that they obeyed physical principles and that there had to be a code script, as he called it. As far as I can tell, it was the first attempt to say that code-script could be as simple as something like Morse code. We have trouble grasping that you can get all the complexity in the world from a 1 and a 0.

TIME:
For some, science is replacing religion as a blind faith. You can see that trend clearly in the realm of "anti-aging" science.

Venter:I would say that’s more like snake oil sales than faith. I don’t want science to replace religion as a belief system other than the belief that truth matters. For politicians, facts and truths are fungible. For scientists’ facts and truths are not fungible.

TIME:
There’s a constant tension in the science community between blue-sky research and commercially driven research aiming at practical, monetizable applications.

Venter:
People do make that argument all the time, but I think it’s a bullshit argument. It just totally is. It’s one that people use to justify living in one world or the other. The fundamental discoveries quite often show their truth in the practical applications. Making atom bombs was, I guess, an applied application, but it was all based on fundamental science.

(MORE: Scientists Identify Rare Gene Mutation that Protects Against Alzheimer’s)

TIME:
You were a poor student. So did your science bent come from your family rather than school?

Venter:
I’m the first scientist in my entire generation of families that started back here in Ireland a long time ago. My father gave us maths quizzes at the dinner table. We did not have casual dinner conversations. Also, in my case, a rebellious attitude has probably been the most beneficial, although painful at times, trait in my life.

TIME:
When you’re approaching this huge mystery "what is life," can you, as a scientist, look at all of us in a sufficiently reductive way to answer the question?

Venter:
I do confess that I probably have a unique perspective on life. Often sitting in airports or other places, I try to imagine people’s genetic lineages.

TIME:
That must be a useful way of distancing yourself when you have arguments.

Venter:
I hadn’t thought about it that way. I should try to do that more.

TIME:
Your synthetic bacterium carries a genetically encoded quote from Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb — of all people. It says "See things not as they are, but as they might be." Why did you pick that?

Venter:
It was a quote that he was supposedly given by his teacher. I thought it was a nice forward-looking statement. [He] was involved in developing the atom bomb, and I guess was hoping that there might be other uses than blowing people up.

TIME:
One of the aspects of your current genetic research that people worry about is that it could go horribly wrong.

Venter:
That’s an unfounded worry. I’m writing a book on synthetic life now and going through all the history of vitalism [which posits that living things are materially different from nonliving things], and trying to understand, in my amateur way, the social anthropology of that kind of thinking. It basically was first clearly articulated by Mary Shelley [in Frankenstein].

(MORE: Decoding Cancer: Scientists Release 520 Tumor Genomes from Pediatric Patients)

TIME:
It’s a fantastic book, isn’t it?

Venter:
Oh yes, and the history of the writing of the book is even more interesting. All of this new science was coming up, with vivisection and trying to understand life. It had to be morally wrong to do that, and if you do this you’ll pay a heavy price in the future.

TIME:
That’s changing, in odd ways. Vampires used to be frightening…

Venter:
And now they’re sexy.

TIME:
But the Frankenstein story is also about the laws of unintended consequences.

Venter:
When we made our announcement [of having created synthetic life in the laboratory], President Obama asked his new commission to look at this issue. They held major hearings and one thing that we’ve always stressed, and the commission report stresses it, is that as we understand life and can engineer and design life, we’re building components to be able to terminate or limit the spread of any new life form. An example I give is the tens of millions of experiments that have been done since the 1970s, putting genes of every organism into E. Coli in laboratories, and there’s never been a problem. The reason for that is the laboratory E. Coli has a chemical dependency. It can’t survive outside that special lab medium.

TIME:Science fiction made fact.

Venter:
The other thing you might have thought science-fiction, there’s now little distinction between computer code and genetic code, and we readily convert one into another. So when we see what’s a genome we’re converting what we call the analogue DNA code into digital code. I’ve described that as digitizing biology. And when we make synthetic genomes, we’re going the other way. So, we now have the ability to transmit life at the speed of light, just sending it through the computer. When we colonize Mars we could [transmit] a new organism to the colony on Mars. We’re actually building what I call a digital biological converter, much in the same way a phone converts digital information into sound. You could email somebody a cell to make energy, to make food.

TIME:
Teleporting.

Venter:
Only it’s real now.

TIME:
Where people used to have fantasies about cloning now, there are increasing numbers of people who believe they will be able to digitally upload themselves.

Venter:
Well, you can digitally upload your genome. You can upload whatever information you have on you.

(LIST: Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs of 2011)

TIME:
Is that immortality?

Venter:You may know that I’ve said that if you want immortality, do something meaningful during your life.

TIME:
Nobody writes a profile of you without mentioning your love of high-adrenaline activities. Dicing with death can confer a sense of immortality.

Venter:
I can see aspects of that, yes. It also just feels good.

TIME:
Do you think you’ll ever win a Nobel Prize?

Venter:
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. Everybody likes acknowledgment from your colleagues that what you’ve done is important. I’ve not been short of scientific awards. I’d rather continue what I’m doing and being able to do high-end science, than if I’d gotten a Nobel Prize 50 years ago and basically retired.

TIME:
Do you read science fiction?

Venter:
Early in my youth I used to enjoy Ray Bradbury, and I was definitely a Star Trek fan later on. Science fiction-based movies, when they are just fantasy, they’re just boring. But when it’s based on a tiny twist of reality of current science, that makes it very exciting. People talked about making synthetic cells in the 1800s. We are DNA software systems, [with] genetic code constantly driving new production of proteins. And proteins are simply robots that are chemically defined.

TIME:
Have you just answered the question what is life?

Venter:
More or less. You don’t need to come to my lecture.

Time:
Finally, you have a dog called Darwin. You don’t have a cat called Schrödinger?

Venter:
My son has a cat and he wanted to name it Schrödinger’s Cat.

Time:
You really are a family apart.

Venter:
It must be genetic because there was no encouragement.

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