Clone Armies And Designer Life

Craig Venter said this in passing, almost under his breath, as he spoke Wednesday night about the future of biology at the Oxonian Society in New York. It was a perfect Venterism. Venter, of course, is the scientist who declared he would lead a project to sequence the human genome faster, better, and much cheaper than the official government effort. He’s the guy who then had the audacity last year to publish the most accurate genome sequence to date–his own. He’s the guy who sailed around the world and trawled six million new genes, which he hopes to use to engineer a microbe that will overthrow the petroleum industry and save us from what he considers the biggest

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