March 12, 2004

• J. Craig Venter, the genomics mogul and scientific wizard who recently created a unique living organism from scratch in a matter of days Do you have a link to this? I googled, and the only relevant thing I got, was an announcement from Dec 99 that he was going to do it.
• Gyan: here
• For information that are about making life from scratch and not Dr. Venter's boat, this looks good. More here.
• From fork's link: "It's almost hyperbole," said David M. Karl, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii who was not involved in the work. "How can you imagine one sample having a million new genes and proteins that we don't know anything about?" Um, is this a tactful scientific way of saying "bullshit"? Venter does have a history of making grandiose claims that can't quite be substantiated (e.g. his claim to have sequenced 99% of the human genome was never verified, as most of the data was never released). On the Sargasso Sea project, this Nature article, from last April, seems balanced and informative; it describes the project as "exciting" but also includes a few sceptical voices.
• And all this time, I thought Venter was just a character in this excellent story arc from the online strip Goats.
• I particularly recommend this strip from the series.
• Update Yooseph et al. report on the 6.12 million new proteins uncovered from 7.7 million GOS sequences by using a novel sequence clustering approach. This nearly doubles the number of known proteins. http://www.venterinstitute.org/press/news/news_2007_03_13.php
• I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer
• Um, hello? FPP?
• Whooo. Crikey. Yeah. FPP.
• Americans are god. And we did not believe them.
• Yeah, someone FPP this already. Lazy bastards.