If you had led a team that sequenced the human genome, then became the world’s first biotechnology billionaire (on paper, at least), and had just finished sailing around the world on your own 95-foot yacht, what would you do next? How about creating life from scratch, saving the Earth from global warming and, as a by-product, ending western dependence on imported energy?
That’s what Craig Venter, the scientist whose private company raced the rest of the world to sequence the human genome, is apparently up to—and I’ve come to meet him in his London hotel to hear more. If the stories were about anyone other than Venter, I would assume they were just dreams. But he has a record of going where no one else would dare, which is why he is described as a maverick, pirate, opportunist, egoist and the “bad boy” of science. And now he has raised a lot of money for a new company looking at novel sources of energy, and has just recruited a top US department of energy official, Aristides Patrinos, to join him. Patrinos is well connected to those who set US energy policy and is said to have had a hand in President Bush’s recent state of the union commitments to finding new energy sources.
Venter is pacing his hotel room, blue-eyed and barefoot, as though still on the deck of his yacht. He was up until 3am trying to out-drink the editor-in-chief of Nature and coffee is in plentiful supply.
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