Brief Biography
Venter was born in Salt Lake City in 1946. He grew up in the Bay Area and was a rather underwhelming student. Venter went to the community college in San Mateo and later transferred to UCSD to study biochemistry. He was drafted during the Vietnam war and working in an intensive care unit for the Navy. After seeing the horrors of war he was inspired to study medicine. He began his biomedical research and made several significant contributions to the field.
Contributions
Venter contributed to a variety of significant projects such as mapping the human genome but one more recent breakthroughs is the creation of synthetic life. For many years scientists were able to manipulate simple bacteria but was never able to create a cell from scratch. Venter and a team of scientists managed to create a totally unique simple cell. This brings the study of bioengineering to a whole new world.
So What?Being able to create cells allows for the creation of organisms to possible rapidly consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Synthetic cells could possible produce methane fuel at a high rate or could be programmed to be customizable vaccines. Synthetic life allows humans to fully customize cells to do their bidding and with this great power comes even greater responsibility.
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