Surfer, scientist, and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is embarking on a new phase of his career this year as he focuses his interest in a new direction--toward three new Rockville, Md.-based organizations he has just established.
The first of these, the Center for the Advancement of Genomics (TCAG), is a policy center dedicated to advancing science through education and public outreach. "If there could be a biological think tank, this is it," Venter explains. "It totally came out of my work on sequencing the human genome."
Sequencing increased his awareness of the potential for genetics-based discrimination in employment and insurance, he explains. TCAG will support the Genetic Nondiscrimination in Health Insurance & Employment Act currently under consideration in Congress--because if people are afraid their genetic code will be used as a weapon against them, genetics research will suffer, he explains.
TCAG will also promote stem cell research. "If we can't understand stem cells, we cannot understand our own biology," Venter says. An anticloning bill sponsored by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.)--which would have outlawed both reproductive cloning (used to produce babies) and therapeutic cloning (used to generate stem cells)--"fortunately did not pass," Venter says, but similar legislation did pass in the House.
"This was one of the first times that basic science would have become criminalized in this country," he says. Under the Brownback-Landrieu bill, "scientists could have gone to jail longer for growing cells in a petri dish than they would for second-degree murder in some states. It also would have criminalized patients and even families for seeking medical treatment. So if Christopher Reeve had sought stem cell therapy for his quadriplegia to see if the nerves in his spinal cord could be regenerated, he might have been a criminal under that bill. What is stunning to me is that this was one of the most repressive laws aimed at modern-day science," and yet the scientific community was not fighting it vigorously, he says.
TCAG will also study misconceptions about genetics and race--such as the notion that an individual's genetic inheritance is determined to an overwhelming extent by his or her racial group. "There are strong advocates for giving certain drugs and medical treatments to people based on their skin color," Venter notes. "It's truly absurd."
The second new organization, the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA), is a research-based institution that will focus on global warming, energy, and fuels. "If we don't do something pretty quickly about global warming, we're going to be potentially causing irreversible damage," he says. "It just has not been elevated yet to a clear part of our everyday public conscience. As a country, we're one of the worst polluters of the atmosphere and the environment. Per capita, Iceland is worse because it's totally dependent on fossil fuels, but Icelanders are trying to do more about it. They're trying to develop the first hydrogen-based economy."
IBEA will seek biological solutions to the global warming problem. The idea for the institute first came up when Venter and coworkers completed the first genome sequence of an archaean, Methanococcus jannaschii. It's an autotroph that lives near high-temperature vents in the Pacific Ocean, uses carbon dioxide as its primary carbon source, and produces methane as a metabolic by-product.
Venter believes microbes like that could help reduce global warming by absorbing excess amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. For example, methanotrophs, which metabolize methane into hydrogen gas, might be able to generate hydrogen for fuel cells and other clean-energy applications. IBEA will also host efforts by Venter and coworkers and by visiting faculty to engineer genomes and to define a minimal set of genes required for life [Science, 286, 2165 (1999)].
TCAG and IBEA--plus the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), the nonprofit research organization founded by Venter in 1992 and currently run by his wife, Claire M. Fraser--are all supported by the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation (JCVSF), the third new organization Venter set up this year. TIGR's endowment--money derived from stock Venter received as a founder of Human Genome Sciences and Celera Genomics (both in Rockville)--has now been transferred to the new foundation.
TCAG, IBEA, JCVSF, and TIGR are thus "a family of not-for-profits," Venter explains. "In the not-for-profit world, things can happen in a very cooperative interactive fashion that can't happen in the commercial world. Very few scientists have had the level of press coverage that I've had from what I've done, and I'm trying to use the bully pulpit I've developed from all that attention to deal with important issues."
