Cruising by the Synthetic Genomics Board meeting in San Diego today.
Not sure why it appears to not be flying a country flag.
Tags: Stealth Boat San Diego marina Navy ship littoral combat
“This place is perfectly safe.
Then why are we wearing hard hats?
It is safe… ugh… for safety. We are wearing safety helmets.
Check. Mate.”
— from my favorite news story, on the LHC
Just got back from a lab tour. Wish I could show you more.
Tags: Synthetic Genomics La Jolla HQ Craig Venter SGI Hard Hat Safety Helmet Lab Tour photo by Juan Enriquez
Welcome to the Hard Rock Hotel, San Diego... a bouncy sprite bounded down the sidewalk.
('tis a very cool hotel, but the tap water was undrinkable; it even overpowered toothpaste, a new experience for me)
Tags: Hard Rock Hotel San Diego stilts jump midnight hijinx
British Petroleum is working with Synthetic Genomics to convert coal directly to methane (the cleanest burning of the fossil fuels) without ever digging the coal out of the ground.
A population of microbes can strip electrons from the coal and do the bioconversion deep underground, without any sunlight, air or thermal flux.
Here in the La Jolla labs, you see various columns of coal and microbial consortia under testing for their conversion capabilities. The natural gas bubbles into the plastic bags.
To gather the microbial consortia, they drilled into a pocket of water trapped in a coal seam. It was rich with life, with 200 species living off each other and happily eating coal a mile underground, with no light or contact with the world. From carbon dating, they concluded that this genetic time capsule has evolved in isolation for 135 million years.
P.S. EDGE has recently put 6 hours of HD video on synthetic biology online. The last two lectures seem the most forward looking. Topics: “What is life, origins of life, in vitro synthetic life, mirror-life, metabolic engineering for hydrocarbons & pharmaceuticals, computational tools, electronic-biological interfaces, nanotech-molecular-manufacturing, biosensors, accelerated lab evolution, engineered personal stem cells, multi-virus-resistant cells, humanized-mice, bringing back extinct species, safety/security policy.”
Tags: Craig Venter SGI Board meeting La Jolla Synthetic Genomics Coal Bed Methane CBM BP Partnership Fuel Biogenic Anaerobic Microbe Consortia FD: we are investors gmo experiment for profit euphemism