Apparently, there just aren’t enough genomes for Craig Venter to sequence here on Earth, so he’s making plans to send a DNA sequencer to Mars.
“There will be life forms there,” Venter said, with his usual confidence, at a Wired Health conference this week in New York.
If he can build a machine to find it, the next steps would be to decode its DNA, beam it back to Earth, put those genetic instructions into a cell and then boot up a Martian life form in a biosecure lab. It may sound far-fetched, but assuming that there is DNA to be found on the Red Planet – a big assumption, to be sure – the notion of equipping a future Mars rover to sequence the DNA isn’t so crazy.
Venter has already sent his yacht around the globe to scoop up seawater and sequence whatever DNA it found in marine microbes. He has also been working on technology to create small genomes from scratch and insert them into living cells to bring these organisms to life. The difference now is that all of this technology would be applied to Mars.
It’s highly unlikely that any DNA-based life forms could survive on the Martian surface, so Venter’s “biological teleporter” (as he dubbed it) would dig under the surface for samples to sequence. If they find anything, “it would take only 4.3 minutes to get the Martians back to Earth,” he said. “Now we can rebuild the Martians in a P4 spacesuit lab.” Via Life on Mars? Scientists hope to find it by decoding Martian DNA.
That Prof Craig Venter is a bit of a lad. He competed with the global research project to sequence the human genome and won by 3 years. He started research to reduce a bacteria genome to the simplest possible by cutting out unnecessary genes and inserted this into a bacteria which had its own genome destroyed and therefore produced the first synthetic life form. I saw a tv program about him, I think it was Horizon, where he was trying to synthetically producing all organelles in a cell so as to eventually be able to completely synthesize a living cell from scratch. He was also the first one to sequence an individuals genome; his own. We haven’t seen the last of this boy yet!
Venter sounds and interesting chappie, I feel a biography post coming on.