Craig Venter Tackles Global Warming

Venture$cience writes: "Fresh from his arguably successful sequencing of the human genome with his company Celera Genomics, Craig Venter is now entering the field of global warming. Specifically, he is readying an ocean wide expedition to harvest novel forms of bacteria from the ocean's deep. From these collections he hopes to find bacteria that excel at converting CO2 into proteins, sugars, and methane. The current candidate for an atmospheric "scrubber" is the ancient Archae family of bacteria that is believed to have helped modify the early Earth's original atmosphere. This all brings up another question concerning what cross-contamination protocols should they use? What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?"

Comments

This worries me

[Cmdr Taco (luser)]

Venter is a egotist to the nth degree, as we saw when he revealed that much of Celera's gene database is comprised of his own genetic code. The news related to the whole Celera enterprise over the last few years is rife with other examples.

Global warming, in my opinion, is not a well understood phenomenon, scientifically. In fact, I'm not convinced that it is even a problem to worry about, but I don't wish to become involved in that debate in this context.

What concerns me is Venter's apparent disregard for scientific procedure, which is often quite rightly conservative. I am afraid that Venter is just the man to unleash a dubious solution to a phantom problem, potentially unbalancing the environment with his CO2-eating bugs much worse than "global warming". Thusfar, Mankind has been shown to be ineffective in reversing the global processes of nature, unless global warming really is such an effect. Attempting to create a form of life with the intent to reverse a reversal of natural processes seems to like playing with fire... or nuclear weapons.

Re:This worries me

[putzin]

I agree. This seems to be staged to keep him in some sort of spotlight for a little while. The only problem here is that he has two things going for him.

1. Money! Duh, with enough cash, the sky is the limit for stupid ventures. (see the tech industry circa 1999)
2. Clout with less technically minded people. He probably could convince other less intelligent or thoughtful individuals with money that he is on the right track.

Anyway, this will probably go away. There doesn't seem to be any sort of real science in any of this, but rather some grandiose parading around. However, I will have to admit that sometimes, good things come from very unlikely places. Maybe he actually starts the project and does something good? Maybe not. Really, until the journal Science publishes a paper or Woods Hole Oceanagraphic signs on to help, I'll just consider this so much news fluff from our new entertainment source, the news.

Not likely...

[Otter]

This all brings up another question concerning what cross-contamination protocols should they use? What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?

Superman notwithstanding, if you bring organisms into an environment utterly unlike what they're designed for they'll die, not develop super powers. It's not like introducing pigs and cats to Hawaii, where they have abundant food and no predators. If some deep-sea methanogen will do well above water, one of the billions that must bubble to the top every day would have already flourished.

You need to be careful anyway so as not to cross-contaminate one sample with another. I wouldn't worry too much beyond that.