The human genome project was hype, says pugnacious geneticist Craig Venter.
In an interview with Der Spiegel:
[he] discusses the 10 years he spent sequencing the human genome, why we have learned so little from it a decade on and the potential for mass production of artificial life forms that could be used to produce fuels and other resources.
Venter has evidently ticked off a lot of people but is unfazed:
SPIEGEL: Wasn’t it more the case that your opponents were afraid that you, as a profit-oriented entrepreneur, would make the human genome your own private property?
Venter: That is totally absurd; and you know it. Initially, Francis Collins and the other people on the Human Genome Project claimed that my methods would never work. When they started to realize that they were wrong, they began personal attacks against me and made up these things about the ownership of the genome. It was all absurd.
SPIEGEL: So it was all just propaganda?
Venter: At the end of the day, it is an argument over nothing. But this battle between common good and commerce — that is the kind of story that sells newspapers.
Could the genome predict a predisposition for cancer? Ventner scoffs:
Venter: … And what else have I learned from my genome? Very little. We couldn’t even be certain from my genome what my eye color was. Isn’t that sad? Everyone was looking for miracle ‘yes/no’ answers in the genome. “Yes, you’ll have cancer.” Or “No, you won’t have cancer.” But that’s just not the way it is.
SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far?
Venter: Close to zero to put it precisely.
What about genes that code for certain behaviors, such as the ‘gay gene’?
Venter: Why did people think there were so many human genes [up to 300,000 instead of the proven 20,000]? It’s because they thought there was going to be one gene for each human trait. And if you want to cure greed, you change the greed gene, right? Or the envy gene, which is probably far more dangerous. But it turns out that we’re pretty complex. If you want to find out why someone gets Alzheimer’s or cancer, then it is not enough to look at one gene. To do so, we have to have the whole picture. …. [To get usable medical knowledge] we need a lot more information: Information about your body’s chemistry, your physiology, your complete medical history, your brain and your entire life. We would need to do that a million times on different people and correlate that data with their genetic information.
Venter, an atheist, admits that
[a] human cell is too complex — we have no idea how any human cell works. We don’t even know how the simplest bacterial cell works.
Apparently, Venter knows no more about cells than Charles Darwin did in his day — and yet somehow random forces produced an artifact that even the most sophisticated genetic scientist admits he doesn’t understand.
ExxonMobile is kicking $600 million his way to develop biotechnology:
SPIEGEL: How long will it be until the life forms you have created start producing fuel for our cars?
Venter: Not only gasoline. Plastic, asphalt, heating oil: Everything that we make from oil will at some point be made by bacteria or other cells. Whether that is in five, 10 or 20 years is unclear. Why don’t we have fuel now other than alcohol from microbes? It’s because nothing evolved that can produce great amounts of biofuel out of CO2. That’s why we have to make it.
You have to wonder: If the U.S. federal government kicked $6 billion his way, would he abandon his independent entrepeneurial stance and drop ExxonMobile altogether?
— Mike Gray