Dr Venter and the Mustard Seed

Venter is a splendidly Dickensian name:  a character that would be full self-important, hyperbolistic and probably ill-tempered  gushings and geyserings and, well, ventings.  (Hard to believe that there isn't one, in fact, but that's what a quick Google seems to confirm.)

So Dr Craig Venter of "Synthia" fame, was rather a disappointment, I thought,  in the TV "flesh", seeming to be a mild-mannered and softly-spoken sort of fellow. But he certainly does the hyperbole well, while journalists who have met him report a lot going on in the eyes...

It didn't take long to see through the overstatements in his claims to have created a new life-form.  The best summation came from Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, reported in the Observer:

"The idea that this is 'playing God' is just daft. What he has done in genetic terms would be analogous to taking an Apple Mac programme and making it work on a PC – and then saying you have created a computer. It's not trivial, but it is utterly absurd the claims that are being made about it."

(Jones does, however, credit Venter with recognising that "[sequencing] the genome was not a problem of chemistry but a problem of computer power.")

Professor John Sulston, who has clashed wih Venter before over the intellectual property issues involved in this kind of work, revealed the business reasons for the hyperbolic claims -  a raid on patents which, because they are so widely drawn, Sulston says, would effectively give Venter a monopoly of entire branches of genetics.



The whole thing was brought into perspective for me when I was seeding a little batch of mustard cress over the weekend.  For each of these tiny, almost particulate-sized, seeds really is a miracle - containing not just the instructions for making an organism  millions of times more complex than the single-celled microbe whose DNA Dr Venter replaced, but also the delivery mechanism to bring it to life, which of course Venter entirely lacks.

This in turn reminded me of Jesus' parable of the mustard seed - the tiny speck which grows into a tree where "the birds of the air" can come to rest.  This parable is usually said to be about the all-inclusive nature of the kingdom of heaven, but it's always seemed a bit of a strange one to me, since mustard doesn't grow into a tree, but rather a spindly kind of bush, with a very dubious capacity for supporting birdlife.  Maybe it's a mistranslation of some Hebrew or Greek along the way.

The story is, however, a wonderful reminder of the (humanly) inconceivable complexity that even the tiniest of seeds represents, and the arrogance of our meddling with something we don't really remotely understand via genetic modification - see my earlier post/rant on this subject.

The really worrying thing about Dr Venter is that his research is funded by, inter alia, BP.  Now there's a company that obviously knows how to contain the fallout from cutting-edge technology when it all goes belly - or in this case, barrels - up!