Thursday March 9, 2017
President, Pope released statements in response to Venter’s project VENTER
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20 years in advance of the first symptoms by using whole-genome sequencing and neuro-quant data, can be prevented with the right drugs, Venter noted. He added that the same could be done with cancer tumors, and there was the potential to move to entirely preventative cancer vaccines, something that already exists for some forms of the disease. Venter said that genotype could predict not only disease but also other phenotypes. His Face Project uses machine learning to reconstruct a three-dimensional human face from the genome alone, he noted. Venter also said that recordings of a voice could be used to predict the speaker’s age, sex, and height. All of this information comes from about 40,000 genome sequences that has produced over 20 petabytes of data, Venter explained. He added that the sequencing of one million human genomes could produce one quintillion bytes of data, an amount that nobody in the world knows how to handle, yet the government could not be convinced that genomics was a big data problem. Sequencing the first human genome, a project whose private arm was spearheaded by Venter, took over nine years, cost more than a billion dollars, and, in 1999, had the third largest computer in the world built solely for that purpose, he explained. Venter’s other major project was the synthesis of a living organism from scratch, which he and his team at the J. Craig Venter
Institute accomplished in 2008 by converting digital binary bits into an organism that could live on its own. “The day we announced this, both the President and the Pope released statements, with the President calling for this to be the number one priority of the bioethics committee, and the Pope reassuring people that we had not actually created life, but just changed one of life’s motors,” he said. Venter’s team also discovered that the genome could be modularized so that entire sets of genes could be classified as “metabolism,” for example, and inserted into the genome. He said that to distinguish this synthetic life from existing organisms, into the genome of the organism was coded the names of the forty scientists that worked on the project, and quotations from James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer, and Feynman. Venter explained that despite having created an entirely new organism, scientists still do not understand the functions of a third of the genes, only that they appear throughout the biological tree and are necessary for the organism’s survival. “Like any good science, we found out how little we know rather than how much we know,” Venter said. The event, part of the Princeton Public Lectures – Vanuxem Lecture Series, was attended by members of the community in addition to Princeton students and faculty. The lecture took place in McCosh 50 at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
The Daily Princetonian
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IMAGE BY SAMVIDA VENKATESH
Craig Venter presented research on genomics in a lecture on Wednesday.
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