Craig Venter’s Modest Goals

Here’s an absolutely fascinating talk given by Craig Venter at last month’s TED conference. This is important work offering great potential.

 

However, I felt that he ducked one of the implications during the discussion after his presentation. The analogy used by the questioner was to suggest that just as the introduction of Pagemaker in 1985 sparked the revolution in desktop publishing, so Venter’s technology would eventually end up as affordable and available to a wide group of people. Venter was somewhat dismissive of bio-hacking, and seemed to be claiming that what his company does is not something that will end up as DIY genetics. My bet is that he will be proven wrong. 

 

 http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf