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Science What is Life? / J. Craig Venter
2016.07.19 10:53
Comment 10
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이한중*65
2016.07.19 11:01
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이한중*65
2016.07.19 11:05
John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biotechnologist, biochemist, geneticist, and entrepreneur. He is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome[1] and the first to transfect a cell with a synthetic genome.[2][3] Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), and is now CEO of Human Longevity Inc. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010".[4] He is a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Advisory Board.[5](from Internet)
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이한중*65
2016.07.19 11:37
Dr. Venter appeared on CNBC today to talk about Human Longevity, Inc. which he founded
and currently offers the latest genome based personalized medicine.
By combining the human genome sequencing and the latest MRI that does not require contrast medium such as gadolinium
they are able to detect cancer in the earliest stage, many in 20's and 30's.
For example, he says they can detect prostate cancer in earliest stage without doing biopsy, etc.
What he said sounded too good to be true.
He said the examination cost $25000 and takes a whole day.
He said genome sequencing which cost about $1000 helps detect cancer and heart disease with the help of
MRI. It sounded like a closest thing to the space age medicine we have seen in TV.
Dr. Venter is unique in that he has been considered by his peers to be not only a genius genome scientist
but also a well-known businessman, obviously making a lot of money.
His company raises hundreds of millions from what I read.
I believe his appearance on business channel today is a commercial promotion of
his latest approach in medicine.
He is not even an MD, but gives you an impression that he is ahead of mainstream medicine.
It is OK, I believe. We need all kinds of geniuses to advance medicine, I believe.
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이한중*65
2016.07.19 11:42
Venter was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the son of Elizabeth and John Venter.[6] In his youth, he did not take his education seriously, preferring to spend his time on the water in boats or surfing.[7] According to his biography, A Life Decoded, he was said to never be a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds on his eighth-grade report cards.[8] He graduated from Mills High School in Millbrae, California.
Although he was against the Vietnam War,[9] Venter was drafted and enlisted in the United States Navy where he worked in the intensive-care ward of a field hospital.[10] While in Vietnam, he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea, but as he got deeper into the sea and was approaching the circling of a shark,[11] he changed his mind more than a mile out.[12] Being confronted with wounded, maimed, and dying [marines] on a daily basis instilled in him a desire to study medicine[13] — although he later switched to biomedical research.
Venter began his college education at a community college, College of San Mateo in California, and later transferred to the University of California, San Diego, where he studied under biochemist Nathan O. Kaplan. He received a BS in biochemistryin 1972, and a PhD in physiology and pharmacology in 1975, both from UCSD.[14] He married former PhD candidate Barbara Rae.[15][16] After working as an associate professor, and later as full professor, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the National Institutes of Health in 1984.
In Buffalo, he divorced Dr. Rae-Venter and married his student, Claire M. Fraser,[16] remaining married to her until 2005.[17] In late 2008 he married Heather Kowalski.[18] They live in La Jolla outside San Diego, California where Venter gut-renovated a $6 million home.[18]
Venter is an atheist.[19]
Venter himself recognized his own ADHD behavior in his adolescence, and later found ADHD-linked genes in his own DNA.[20]
(from Internet. ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)
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이한중*65
2016.07.19 20:26
Venter was passionate about the power of genomics to radically transform healthcare. Venter believed that shotgun sequencing was the fastest and most effective way to get useful human genome data.[23] The method was rejected by the Human Genome Project however, since some geneticists felt it would not be accurate enough for a genome as complicated as that of humans, that it would be logistically more difficult, and that it would cost significantly more.[24][25]
Frustrated with what Venter viewed as the slow pace of progress in the Human Genome project, and unable to get funds for his ideas, he sought funding from the private sector to fund Celera Genomics.[26] The goal of the company was to sequence the entire human genome and release it into the public domain for non-commercial use in much less time and for much less cost than the public human genome project. The company planned to profit from their work by creating a value-added database of genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee. The goal consequently put pressure on the public genome program and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence. DNA from five demographically different individuals was used by Celera to generate the sequence of the human genome; one of the individuals was Venter himself.
In 2000, Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Public Genome Project jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome, a full three years ahead of the expected end of the Public Genome Program. The announcement was made along with U.S. President Bill Clinton, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.[27] Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network.[28] On the 15 February 2001, the Human Genome Project consortium published the first Human Genome in the journal Nature, and was followed, one day later, by a Celera publication in Science.[29][30] Despite some claims that shotgun sequencing was in some ways less accurate than the clone-by-clone method chosen by the Human Genome Project,[31] the technique became widely accepted by the scientific community.
Although Celera was originally set to sequence a composite of DNA samples, partway through the sequencing, Venter switched the samples for his own DNA.[32]
After contributing to the Human Genome, and its release into the public domain, Venter was fired by Celera in early 2002.[33]According to his biography, Venter was ready to leave Celera, and was fired due to conflict with the main investor, Tony White, that had existed since day one of the project. Venter writes that his main goal was always to accelerate science and thereby discovery, and he only sought help from the corporate world when he could not(from Internet)
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It seems that Dr. John Venter is somewhat unusual person. I have some nagging feeling about him.
Not only he was supposedly successful in his research,
but also he was "very" successful in making money, accumulating vast wealth, and riding a big fame.
Generally, honesty doesn't go well and is not a part of these kinds of stuff.
Having switched the samples for his own DNA, and having been fired by Celera, and etc.,
he reminds me of our famous Korean researcher Dr. Hwang.
I wish he has been true to himself and to the science but I don't want to get too much excited.
We had been burned on something like these before.
Doc, we do not need "all kinds of geniuses" to advance medicine,
instead, we need dumb hard worker living in a small hut and on a small salary.
Something is very "fishy" in his story. I could not help smelling it.
All the "miraculous" claims he made need to be proven with time and actual practice.
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이한중*65
2016.07.20 23:23
Of note, you may listen to his lecture in the video and at the same time read the text of his lecture. Following is the conclusion.
.......
"We can digitize life, and we generate life from the digital world. Just as the ribosome can convert the analogue message in mRNA into a protein robot, it's becoming standard now in the world of science to convert digital code into protein viruses and cells. Scientists send digital code to each other instead of sending genes or proteins. There are several companies around the world that make their living by synthesizing genes for scientific labs. It's faster and cheaper to synthesize a gene than it is to clone it, or even get it by Federal Express.
As an example BARDA in the US government sends us as a part of our synthetic genomic flu virus program with Novartis, an email with a test pandemic flu virus sequence. We convert the digital sequence into a flu virus genome in less than 12 hours. We are in the process of building a simple smaller faster converter device, "a digital to biological converter", that in a fashion similar to the telephone where digital information is converted to sound; we can send digital DNA code at the close to the speed of light and convert the digital information into proteins, viruses and living cells. With a new flu pandemic we could digitally distribute a new vaccine in seconds around the world, perhaps even to each home in the future.
Currently all life is derived from other cellular life including our synthetic cell. This will change in the near future with the discovery of the right cocktail of enzymes, ribosomes, and chemicals including lipids together with the synthetic genome to create new cells and life forms without a prior cellular history. Look at the tremendous progress in the 70 years since Schrodinger's lecture on this campus. Try to imagine 70 years from now in the year 2082 what will be happening. With the success of private space flight, the moon and Mars will be clearly colonized. New life forms for food or energy production or for new medicines will be sent as digital information to be converted back into life forms in the 4.3 to 21 minutes that it takes for a digital wave to go from earth to Mars.
I suggested in place of sending living humans to distant galaxies that we can send digital information together with the means to boot it up in tiny space vessels. More importantly and as I will speak to on Saturday evening synthetic life will enable us to understand all life on this planet and to enable new industries to produce food, energy, water and medicine as we add 1 billion new humans to earth every 12 years.
Schrodinger's "What is Life?" helped to stimulate Jim Watson and Francis Crick to help kick off this new era of DNA science. One can only hope that the newest frontier of synthetic life will have a similar impact on the future."
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이한중*65
2016.07.21 07:54
There are two giants in the field of current human genomic science, Francis Collins, MD and J. Craig Venter, PhD.
They both together are given the credit for the successful completion of the human genome sequencing years ago.
It is interesting to note how each reacted spiritually when they were pioneering their field of science uncovering
the secrets of Creator in how HE created life and humans.
Dr. Collins found himself in such an awe that he became so humbled and became a Christian.
Dr. Collins' mom and dad were Ivy League professors who were atheists and raised their son as such.
Dr. Collins talks about his spiritual journey in his best selling book, "The Language of God", which I once introduced in this space.
On the other hand, Dr. Venter obviously remains as an atheist.
It is indeed amazing to know that we have discovered the fundamental secrets of life, and we can digitize life,
and human beings are all products of nothing but Creator's computer software as Dr. Venter illustrates so clearly.
We humans already can create life, "synthetic life", by using the secrets, codes.
One might feel sad by listening to this lecture, but at the same time one might react the same way Dr. Collins did
and try to find the reason why we humans are allowed to have HIS secrets of creation. Why? What for?
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이한중*65
2016.07.21 22:43
Christianity by Francis Collins, MD(from Internet)
Collins has described his parents as "only nominally Christian"[citation needed] and by graduate school he considered himself an atheist. However, dealing with dying patients led him to question his religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He familiarized himself with the evidence for and against God in cosmology, and used Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis[63] as a foundation to re-examine his religious view. He eventually came to a conclusion, and became a Christian during a hike on a fall afternoon. He has described himself as a "serious Christian".[26]
In his 2006 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins wrote that scientific discoveries were an "opportunity to worship" and that he rejected both Young Earth creationism and intelligent design. His own belief, he wrote, was theistic evolution or evolutionary creation, which he preferred to call BioLogos. He wrote that one can "think of DNA as an instructional script, a software program, sitting in the nucleus of the cell".[64] He appeared in December 2006 on The Colbert Report television show and in a March 2007 Fresh Air radio interview to discuss this book.[65][66] In an interview with D. J. Grothe on the Point of Inquiry podcast he said that the overall aim of the book was to show that "one can be intellectually in a rigorous position and argue that science and faith can be compatible", and that he was prompted to write the book because "most people are seeking a possible harmony between these worldviews [science and faith], and it seems rather sad that we hear so little about this possibility.[67]
Collins is a critic of intelligent design, and for this reason he was not asked to participate in the 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Walt Ruloff, a producer for the film, claimed that by rejecting intelligent design, Collins was "toeing the party line", which Collins called "just ludicrous".[68][clarification needed] In an interview he stated that "intelligent design is headed for collapse in the not too distant future" and that "science class ought to be about science, and opening the door to religious perspectives in that setting is a big mistake."[67] In 2007, Collins founded the BioLogos Foundation to "contribute to the public voice that represents the harmony of science and faith". He served as the foundation's president until he was confirmed as director of the NIH.[69] Collins has also spoken at the Veritas Forum on the relationship between science and religion and the existence of God.[70]
Christopher Hitchens referred to Francis Collins as a 'Great American' and stated that Collins was one of the most devout believers he had ever met.[71] He further stated that Collins was sequencing the genome of the cancer that would ultimately claim Hitchen's life, and that their friendship despite their differing opinion on religion was an example of the greatest armed truce in modern times.
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이한중*65
2016.07.22 11:31
What Is Life?
What Is Life?
Mind and Matter
Title pages of 1948 edition
Author Erwin Schrödinger Country United Kingdom Language English Genre Popular science Publisher Cambridge University Press Publication date
1944 Media type Print Pages 194 pp. ISBN 0-521-42708-8 OCLC 24503223 574/.01 20 LC Class QH331 .S357 1992 What Is Life? is a 1944 science book written for the lay reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. The lectures attracted an audience of about 400, who were warned "that the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not be termed popular, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized."[1] Schrödinger's lecture focused on one important question: "how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?"[1]
In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the genetic molecule. Although the existence of DNA had been known since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger's lecture. In retrospect, Schrödinger's aperiodic crystal can be viewed as a well-reasoned theoretical prediction of what biologists should have been looking for during their search for genetic material. Both James D. Watson,[2] and independently, Francis Crick, co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, credited Schrödinger's book with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and each respectively acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for their initial researches.[3](from Internet)
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This is the most fascinating, mind-boggling, high-powered, enlightening, 21st century cutting edge perspective, lecture
on the question, "What is life?"