My initial response to this question was, “Chinese!” I was only half joking. English is the most popular second language in the world and in our increasingly connected world, the people who have an understanding of other languages—particularly Chinese—will be better equipped.

As far as computers go, I studied computer languages in school and even though I wish I had studied different “human” languages, I think understanding computer languages will become even more important in the future, since computers are the universal tools of our time. Practically every aspect of our lives has a computer of some sort embedded into it. Having an understanding of how computers work as well as a curiosity about how to tap into their future potential will be important.

This need is especially true when you consider all of the potential applications that could be created to help us better understand biology and how the world works. We are living in an age where information technology and computing are driving the economy, and I predict computer-driven advances in synthetic biology promise to be even potentially more dramatic for the balance of the century.

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[Editor's note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: "If you could patent one thing, what would it be?"]

Broad claims covering delivery of therapeutics using engineered bacteria. Synthetic biology tools emerging in just the last few years have made this possible. The trick, of course, is precise control. If I could patent a sure-fire control technology enabling precise delivery of drugs and biologics through living organisms such as bacteria, I would quit my day job.

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Boston-based Novophage has raised $5.7 million in a Series A financing round led by Flybridge Capital Partners. Founder Collective, Boston University, and strategic investors Chevron Technology Ventures and The Kraft Group also participated in the round. The news was first reported by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe. Novophage engineers viruses (phages) to combat bacterial contamination in industries like oil and gas, paper, and heating and cooling systems. As part of the financing, Micah Rosenbloom (co-founder of Brontes Technologies) has joined the firm as CEO. Xconomy profiled Novophage back in March 2009, when the company was more focused on therapeutic applications.

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What is the right genetic profile for an astronaut—someone who’s going to spend months living on the moon, or years traveling to an asteroid or Mars?

Craig Venter has an answer. The biologist told a group of scientists at NASA Ames on Saturday that NASA already does genetic selection when it picks astronauts. He just suggests that the space agency get even more systematic about its process.

“Inner ear changes could allow people to escape motion sickness,” Venter said. “(You could have genes for) bone regeneration, DNA repair from radiation, a strong immune system, small stature, high energy utilization, a low risk of genetic disease, smell receptors, a lack of hair, slow skin turnover, dental decay and so on. If people are traveling in space for their whole lives, they may want to engineer genetic traits for other purposes.”

Venter is currently a co-founder and CEO of San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a non-profit in Rockville, MD, that is working to discover and sequence as many genes as possible. He and his team developed a rapid technique for sequencing genes that beat the Human Genome Project’s approach to the problem in 2000.

He calls genetic engineering tools “the number-one wealth generator for the next century” and told the scientists that they give the world “the chance to completely change how we make everything, from food to fuel.”

NASA, meanwhile, is exploring the possibility of sending humans into space for long periods, and conditions in space can be problematic—everything from sweat to vomit to human waste has to be handled.

Venter described how rapid sequencing of genes could help NASA to better understand and cope with the closed environment of a space capsule, where each astronaut carries thousands of bacteria in his or her body.

“If you measure your blood stream after a meal, you will have … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics, co-founded by human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter, and the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute, are forming a new company called Synthetic Genomics Vaccines.

The startup plans to develop next-generation vaccines, using the latest advances in synthetic biology and genomic sequencing from the Maryland-based Venter institute, and intellectual property and “business acumen” from Synthetic Genomics, according to a statement today. The new vaccine company also has formed a three-year alliance with Novartis, the Swiss pharma giant, to collaborate in the development of influenza seed strains needed for vaccine manufacturing.

The collaboration with Novartis is supported by an award from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority that is intended to lay the groundwork for a more effective public health response to seasonal and pandemic flu outbreaks. The companies did not specify the amount of the award.

Under their collaboration, Novartis and Synthetic Genomics Vaccines plan to establish a “bank” of synthetically created seed viruses, which could be used to produce vaccines as soon as the World Health Organization identifies seasonal flu strains of concern. Currently, the WHO distributes live reference viruses after they have been identified to major vaccine manufacturers like Novartis. By creating the bank, Synthetic Genomics says the partnership could reduce vaccine production time by as much as two months, which would be critical during a pandemic.

The Venter Institute has been working with Novartis for more than a decade to apply its expertise in genomics to the development of new vaccines. Their last collaboration resulted in a technique now known as “reverse vaccinology,” a genomics-based way of finding new targets for vaccines that’s faster than traditional methods. Using advances in synthetic genomics, the companies say it is conceivable that more universal vaccines could be developed to target a broader range of infectious agents.

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Back on May 28th, Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) said it had agreed to pay approximately $47 million in cash to acquire a 74 percent stake in Geneart, a German company that specializes in making synthetic genes.

Less than a week later, Life announced that it had made an undisclosed investment (which later turned out to be $10 million) in Synthetic Genomics, the San Diego startup working to develop gasoline and other biofuels from genetically engineered algae.

A couple of other announcements followed in August and September. First, Life Technologies and SG Biofuels of Encinitas, CA, announced that they had completed sequencing the genome of the Jatropha curcas plant, which produces a walnut-size oil seed that can be used to make biofuels. And then, a few weeks later, SG Biofuels revealed that it had raised $9.4 million in a Series A round of venture funding that included Life Technologies.

Connecting the dots, it’s apparent that Life Technologies has decided to make some inroads in the emerging business of synthetic biology and algae-based biofuels. It’s also unlikely that a company that generated $3.3 billion in sales last year would make such a move lightly. So I arranged an interview with Nathan Wood, a vice president of genomics who is part of the company’s Molecular Biology Systems division.

In a nutshell, Wood says Life Technologies wants to do the same thing for synthetic biology that it has done for genomics—Life Technologies has become a global biotech by supplying the laboratory instruments, services, and supplies that scientists need to analyze the genetic code of any organism. Wood explained that the company near San Diego now wants to supply the tools that scientists need to assemble snippets of genetic code to create new organisms “so researchers won’t have to go somewhere else to get the tools they need.”

To accomplish this goal, Wood says Life decided in 2008 to undertake a $100 million initiative focused on synthetic biology. In 2009, the company began … Next Page »

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Emeryville, CA-based Amyris Biotechnologies is unusual in several respects. One of the synthetic biology company’s first big projects, back in 2005, was a non-profit venture with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to engineer microbes to produce artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug. (It handed off that work to pharmaceuticals giant Sanofi-Aventis in 2008.) Then the company turned its attention to synthetic fuels, and this week it became one of the first advanced biofuels company to go public. Amyris’s stock, trading under the ticker symbol AMRS, debuted on the NASDAQ exchange yesterday, bringing in $85 million in new capital.

Co-founded by UC Berkeley bioengineer Jay Keasling, Amyris found early on that by tweaking the genes of yeast cells, it could cause the microorganisms to produce large quantities of an artemisinin precursor. It’s developed that same approach into what it calls an “industrial synthetic biology platform,” focused on a pathway in yeast metabolism that produces terpenoids, which can be processed into many different drugs, specialty chemicals, and fuels.

The company says it creates and tests thousands of yeast strains every day to find those that produce target molecules most efficiently; these strains convert sugar sources such as sugarcane to intermediary molecules in large fermentation tanks. The company’s initial products are all derivatives of a terpenoid called trans-beta-farnesene (Biofene), which it hopes to convert into renewable substitutes for petroleum-based fuels like diesel and jet fuel, and eventually into other chemicals such as lubricants and surfactants and even cosmetics and fragrances.

There’s a lot of money riding on those hopes—as there is on competing biofuels companies like Bio Architecture Lab, Joule Unlimited, LS9, Sapphire Energy, and Synthetic Genomics. Prior to its IPO, Amyris had raised a stunning $244 million from a long list of backers including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, TPG Biotechnology Partners, Votorantim Novos Negocios, Advanced Equities, DAG Ventures, Grupo Cornélio Brennand, Naxos UK, The Westly Group, Stratus Group, and French oil giant Total SA.

In trading yesterday, Amyris shares climbed to about $16.50, or 3 percent above their initial price of $16. As of 11:00 Eastern time today, the stock had reached $16.62.

Amyris has pilot plants in Emeryville and in Campinas, Brazil, where it hopes to use the country’s abundant sugarcane crop to reduce diesel fuel consumption by public buses in cities like Sao Paulo. The company said in its S-1 registration statement for the initial public offering that it expects to begin commercial production of biofuels in 2011 through contract manufacturers, and that its own industrial-scale plant in Brazil will be up and running by mid-2012. Through agreements with major Brazilian sugarcane producers such as Bunge Limited, Amyris says it has access to 10 million tons of sugarcane annually.

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Every hot startup has to put up or shut up at some point. This is when it’s time to stop talking about the gee-whiz founding idea and scientific progress. It’s the point when a company needs to prove it can operate a disciplined, sustainable business. The moment is fast approaching for LS9.

LS9, the South San Francisco-based maker of renewable biofuels, has been hot stuff in the cleantech world for a few years. The company counts a trio of star scientific founders in UC Berkeley’s Jay Keasling, Chris Somerville of the Energy Biosciences Institute, and Harvard University’s George Church. It has deep-pocketed venture capitalists on both coasts in Cambridge, MA-based Flagship Ventures and Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures, who have pumped in $45 million since the company was founded in 2005.

The buzz came from being part of the nascent field of synthetic biology. As Craig Venter has recently demonstrated, scientists are getting better at manipulating the fundamental unit of life, the cell. In the case of LS9, the company has sought to swap in and out a few enzymes inside bacteria so that instead of converting sugars into fatty acids, they could become super-efficient engines for converting sugars into fuels like diesel. Change out an enzyme here or there, and LS9 can also make higher-priced industrial chemicals like the ones that go into soap or toothpaste. The key would be to do this through an industrial fermentation process, and do the work at large scale, at low cost, using existing infrastructure, and in a controlled, reproducible manner.

Stephen del Cardayre

The first couple of years for LS9, according to R&D chief Stephen del Cardayre, were about proving that the company could in fact create a one-step process in which sugar goes into a fermenter and fuels, rather than fats, come out. If the company could do this in a straight one-step process, without creating chemical intermediaries that need to undergo an expensive hydrogenation refinement process, then they’d have an edge over competitors on cost. The next couple of years were about showing the LS9 process could work in a pilot scale, in 1,000-liter batches. The company checked that box. It even showed the fuel in this tiny quantity could pass ASTM certification, which basically says it meets performance standards and won’t wreck engines.

But this year, LS9 will find out if it’s really ready to go from the lab to the factory. The company bought a mothballed fermentation plant in Okeechobee, Florida—a rural part of the Sunshine State—for a paltry $2 million. The plan is to retrofit this old plant so that it can … Next Page »

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The big news came with a guilty plea by Sequenom’s former R&D chief, but it’s just the beginning. In pleading guilty, Elizabeth Dragon agreed to cooperate with a continuing criminal investigation of wrongdoing in the company’s development of a prenatal diagnostic test for Down syndrome. Our weekly wrap-up begins here.

—The former chief of research and development at San Diego’s Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) pleaded guilty yesterday to conspiring to commit securities fraud. Elizabeth A. Dragon, who joined Sequenom in 2006 after 16 years at Roche Molecular Diagnostics, admitted in federal court that she had lied to investors about the sensitivity and accuracy of a prenatal genetic test the company was developing for Down syndrome. Dragon, who has agreed to cooperate with a continuing criminal investigation, also settled a civil suit filed yesterday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

—San Diego’s DexCom (NASDAQ: DXCM) says it will comply with changes sought by the FDA in the way it labels certain biomedical devices used to monitor blood sugar levels. In a warning letter sent to the company, the FDA says DexCom should have disclosed that its sensor wires sometimes fracture, leaving wire splinters under the skin of some users.

—James Sweeney, who started CardioNet (NASDAQ: BEAT) in San Diego and led its $425 million IPO in 2008, says his advice to startup CEOs about initial public offerings is “to avoid going public at all costs.” Sweeney, who now heads San Diego’s PatientSafe Solutions, talked about IPOs, reverse mergers, and other corporate exits during a meeting of the San Diego Venture Group.

—In a small step for gene therapy, San Diego-based Celladon says its gene therapy treatment for healing patients with advanced heart failure didn’t appear to cause any serious side effects and was more effective than a placebo in a study with 39 patients. The biotech hasn’t yet disclosed exactly how effective its treatment is.

—Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) made an undisclosed equity investment in San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics, the startup co-founded by genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter. Life Technologies makes many of the laboratory instruments and materials that Synthetic Genomics and other biotechs use to sequence the genomes of different organisms.

—Life Technologies also disclosed that it has acquired a 74 percent ownership stake in Germany’s GeneArt, one of five small companies around the world that specialize in synthesizing custom-ordered genes for use in biomedical research.

—Luke profiled Blue Heron Biotechnology, which is the Bothell, WA, biotech that Craig Venter recently turned to in making the first bacterial cell with an entirely synthetic genome. Like GeneArt, Blue Heron is among the five small biotechs that specialize in synthesizing custom-ordered genes for use in biomedical research.

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Life Technologies,  the Carlsbad, CA-based company that makes instruments and lab supplies for biologists, said today it has acquired a 74 percent ownership stake in Germany-based Geneart through a tender offer to the smaller company’s shareholders. Geneart is one of five small companies around the world  that specialize in synthesizing custom-ordered genes for use in biomedical research. Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) bought 59 percent of the company on April 9 for 11.59 euros a share, and other shareholders tendered shares at 13.75 euros. Life Technologies said it plans to enhance Geneart’s distribution capability and commercial network in the U.S.

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A rising star of the Boston-area venture capital scene is in Seattle today. He’s David Berry, a partner with Flagship Ventures, and he’s speaking on a panel tonight that will tackle a question on every young company’s mind, when it comes to financing: to VC or not to VC? The event is organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum, and the other speakers will include Jonathan Sposato from Picnik (a bootstrapped startup recently acquired by Google); Mark Ashida from OVP Venture Partners; Michael Butler from Cascadia Capital; and moderator Chase Franklin from Daptiv (the former CEO of Qpass).

Berry’s background is quite different from the other panelists—and from most VCs. He graduated in 2005 with an MD-PhD from Harvard and MIT, where he studied bioengineering under professors Ram Sasisekharan and Robert Langer. Flagship Ventures stole him away from an academic career to work on building new companies and developing technologies in energy and therapeutics. He has since co-founded LS9, a Silicon Valley-based synthetic biology firm developing new fuels and chemicals, and Joule Unlimited (formerly Joule Biotechnologies), a Cambridge, MA-based startup that’s using genome engineering to create other types of clean fuels. (Given the strong interest in biofuels and renewable chemicals in the Northwest, Berry has plenty of connections out here.)

When it comes to advising entrepreneurs, Berry is frank about the alternatives to venture money. “It’s unusual for a VC to say venture capital is not always the best choice,” Berry told me by phone yesterday. “But with venture capital firms folding, you have to know where your money is coming from. While money is fungible, long-term money isn’t.”

Here are a few edited highlights from my chat with Berry:

—On his general advice to entrepreneurs:

“At some point you do need capital. There are ways where you can get government grants and so forth. In certain areas you can get some revenues to offset capital needs. As [entrepreneurs] think about where they want to go, the real question is who are the best partners to have along the way, to build the company. That means someone who’s not only trusted around the board table or as an advisor, but someone who will challenge you and push back and make sure you’re thinking strategically in the best way possible.

“From our end [Flagship], we invest in the beginning of a company—the two most important assets are its people and its IP. We care about having the best people around the table, entrepreneurial people who want to solve big problems. Also, people who have a very interesting approach to that—differentiated technologies that are IP protected, and that have some degree of validation.”

—On alternatives to VC in energy and biotech:

“Venture has played a bit of a mainstay role as of late. In energy, there are sovereigns and private wealth holders which have played significant roles—Temasek, and Masdar has been quite active … Next Page »

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The founders of Boston-based Ginkgo BioWorks think that assembling synthetic biological systems shouldn’t just be for experienced researchers. So they put together a kit that consists of the “scissors and glue for putting together pieces of DNA,” says co-founder Reshma Shetty.

Unlike the electronics industry, which sets standards to ensure compatibility and interoperability, the methods for putting together pieces of DNA are typically much more fragmented and ad hoc. Biologists build biological systems and organisms for functions such as producing everything from fuel to drugs to consumer products. The Ginkgo kit builds on a publicly available standard for connecting pieces of DNA, developed in 2003 by another Ginkgo co-founder, MIT senior research scientist Tom Knight. Called the BioBrick standard, it facilitates the assembly of multi-gene systems, and allows parts to be more easily shared within the synthetic biology community.

Ginkgo’s BioBrick Assembly Kit includes the reagents for constructing BioBrick parts, which are nucleic acid sequences that encode a specific biological function and adhere to the BioBrick assembly standard. The kit, which includes the instructions for putting those parts together, sells for $235 through the New England BioLabs, an Ipswich, MA-based supplier of reagents for the life sciences industry.

Shetty didn’t release any specific sales figures for the kit, but said its users include students, researchers, and industrial companies. The kit was also intended to be used in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM), in Cambridge, MA. The undergraduate contest, co-launched by Knight, challenges students teams to use the biological parts to build systems and operate them in living cells.

The assembly kit is the first product from Ginkgo, which was started in 2008 by Shetty, Knight, and three other MIT PhDs, but the company is also working on rolling out a consulting-style service for more elaborate DNA construction. They plan to work with companies on determining how they can design biological systems to fit their business functions, modeling what that system would look like, and testing it. “We’re focused on the tools and services for engineering biological systems,” says Shetty. “We think of ourselves as a biological design firm.”

Ginkgo (named after the tree) isn’t pursuing any venture capital funding, because it hasn’t needed it, Shetty says. In September 2009, the company received a $150,000 loan from LifeTech Boston, a city initiative aimed to grow the life sciences industry. Ginkgo was also selected that month to be part of an initiative in Scotland to improve synthetic DNA assembly. ITI Life Sciences, a unit formed by the Scottish government to strengthen the life sciences industry in the country, dedicated $4.1 million to the project.

While many established life sciences companies have in-house personnel dedicated to constructing biological systems, many other industries—from cosmetics to cleantech—can benefit from simple tools for the construction of synthetic DNA, Shetty says. A makeup manufacturer who uses a plant compound in its products could use the kit for constructing bacteria or yeast to create a synthetic form of that compound, for example. That way the company wouldn’t be affected by price increases from a bad crop of the plant. “It’s cheaper and more reliable manufacturing,” Shetty says.

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When I profiled Verdezyne in November, the Carlsbad, CA-based startup didn’t want to disclose the first feedstock chemical it is aiming to displace by using genetically engineered yeast in a fermentation tank instead of a petrochemical refinery. Today Verdezyne is announcing it can use its proprietary sustainable processes to make adipic acid, a primary ingredient needed to make nylon. Verdezyne’s Damien Perriman tells me the process Verdezyne demonstrated in its lab could reduce the production costs of adipic acid by 20 percent or more. He estimates the global market for adipic acid at close to $5.2 billion a year. The announcement comes just in time for the Bio-Based Chemicals Summit that begins today at the Westin San Diego.

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The next decade will see the realization of many of the buzzwords of the last decade. The combination of the information era, the biotechnology revolution, and materials breakthroughs will drive new medical and cleantech inventions that will change our lives. The future of innovation in the United States is promising at its core and we will win unless policy makers accidentally harm innovation. They seem to be trying to do just that, in spite of their rhetoric, by doubling capital gains taxes on investors who fund job-creating cleantech and medical breakthroughs, proposing revised patent laws to penalize innovations, and accidentally constraining capital markets for high-tech with onerous regulations.

Still, here are the five innovations to watch in the coming decade:

1. The Return of Nanotechnology. Although much maligned as a “bubble,” this fundamental set of materials technologies that can unlock new physical properties and combinations of materials has been percolating away. Look for major innovations in solar energy that can produce electricity at 6 cents per kilowatt hour and which will compete with conventional power without subsidy. These are in the field now and will blow away the current big names in solar thermal, concentrated photovoltaics (CPV) and thin film solar. New battery innovations on flexible substrates and new form factors that are 2-5 times more efficient than current lithium ion batteries will emerge from the laboratory.

2. Industrial Applications of Synthetic Biology. Many people think the word “synthetic biology” is a marketing word for “biology.” That is mostly true, but the technical strides in sequencing and synthesis of genes into complex systems is nothing short of mind-boggling. The folks who will succeed here are not the providers of the biology, but those who understand and own the biology AND can integrate it into industries like fuel, and agriculture. Companies like Sapphire Energy are already developing technologies that will revolutionize fuels and agriculture as we know it. The United States will produce our own green crude oil at home and at huge scale by 2020.

3. P4 Medicine. A term coined by Leroy Hood to embody Personalized, Predictive, Preventive, and Participatory medicine. This technology will come of age. Driven by new cost reductions in the ability to sequence human genomes, we will finally be able to understand who will get disease, detect the disease early, and administer medicines that will work, only to those who need it. Medicine will be more cost effective and more targeted and “Smart pills” will be better and cheaper than expensive hospitals. The biggest barriers here are political—none of this will happen without … Next Page »

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After Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne disclosed last month that it plans to raise more than $15 million in venture funding, I arranged to sit down with Damien Perriman, the company’s vice president of business development.

As it turns out, the startup that was founded in 2005 as CODA Genomics has essentially re-engineered itself over the past 18 months. The company overhauled its core business strategy, recruited a new CEO, E. William Radany, along with a new management team, changed its name, and moved its headquarters from Orange County to Carlsbad, CA, about 28 miles north of San Diego. In changing its name to Verdezyne, the company created an identity that is better aligned with its revised focus on the “green design” of biofuels and industrial chemicals.

The company initially was focused on technology spun out from UC Irvine that used specialized computer algorithms to design synthetic DNA. The company offered its services in Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly, or CODA, to help drug discovery teams at pharmaceutical customers like Eli Lilly and Genentech design synthetic genes that could be used to maximize the production of certain proteins for their biotech drug manufacturing processes.

Perriman, who joined Verdezyne in February, tells me, “Our investors made a decision in 2008 that we could make a lot more money by doing the production ourselves.”

With its extensive experience in computational biology and bioinformatics, Verdezyne saw the value in creating high-diversity libraries of genes, so that various genes could be inserted into fast-dividing yeast cells (and other micro-organisms), essentially programming the microbes to produce enzymes it would not otherwise produce. Verdezyne landed a federal grant last month to help build out its genomic library.

“We prefer to work with yeast,” Perriman says, “but we can work with any fungi or bacterial organism.”

The company, which now has 26 employees, has identified three primary markets for its technology.

The first and most obvious target is an … Next Page »

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It may be that TEDMED founder Richard Saul Wurman is the Brett Favre of emcees, or perhaps he’s like Al Pacino in Godfather III, who proclaims in exasperation, “Just when I thought I was out—they pull me back in!”

But after a five-year hiatus, TEDMED has returned this week (opening last night at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado), and Wurman, who is both the TEDMED chairman emeritus and lead master of ceremonies, stepped back onstage for what must be a familiar role. He is the folksy glue that brings the sometimes-esoteric show back to Earth as leading thinkers in medicine, health care, and life sciences deliver 15- to 20-minute talks about their work and big ideas.

So, for example, after J. Craig Venter, a leader in genomic sequencing and synthetic biology, ended his presentation last night, Wurman took the stage and reassured the crowd by saying, “I’ve heard Craig speak a number of times. And I don’t understand it all…”

The four-day TEDMED symposium, which costs $4,000 per person to attend (and is sold out), follows a format similar to the first conference in Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) that Wurman established in 1984. Chris Anderson acquired rights to that TED business in 2001 and Boston entrepreneur (and Xconomist) Marc Hodosh got rights earlier this year to TEDMED and its focus on health care. Wurman told us he had agreed to help Hodosh out this year, and between sessions he often helped the audience by identifying themes they would likely see emerging in presentations to come.

“Maps are also patterns, and patterns are the threads that run through this conference,” Wurman said. “They are the constructive tissue that holds ideas together.” Those emerging ideas include:

—J. Craig Venter, the co-founder and CEO of San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics, said about 21 million genes have been discovered since the first genome was sequenced in 1995—“and over 20 million have been taken from the deck of my sailboat.” (Venter’s sailboat, the Sorcerer II, embarked from San Diego in March on an expedition to collect and sequence marine organisms.) Venter also outlined synthetic biology research that aims to transplant a chromosome from one cell into another cell—and turn it into a different species. Venter says, “I think it’s possible we’ll have the first species powered by a synthetic chromosome by the end of this year, although that’s something I’ve been saying now for two years.”

—Anthony Atala, a urologist and director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, showed how researchers are using “smart biomaterials” to patch damaged organs and grow new heart valves, blood vessels, liver, muscle, skin, ears, and even fingers. Still, Atala said, “90 percent of patients on transplantation waiting lists are waiting for kidneys.” He also noted that the organs with lots of blood vessels—the heart, liver, and kidney—are the hardest to grow.

—Bill Davenhall, who leads the health and human services marketing team at ESRI, the Redlands, CA, company that specializes in geographic information systems, argued for the creation of new programs and training in “geo-medicine”—and for ensuring that GIS data can be included in electronic health records. He demonstrated his point with a map that shows geographical areas in mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states where heart attacks occur far more frequently than other parts of the country. Davenhall, who said he suffered a heart attack in 2001, associates environmental factors in the places where he has lived with the higher incidence rate. He grew up with high levels of sulfur dioxide in Scranton, PA, before moving to Louisville, KY, with high levels of chloropene and benzene. He now lives east of Los Angeles in Redlands, CA, which has high levels of airborne particulates, carbon dioxide, and ozone. He told the audience, “Doctors never ask me about my place history. But if I wanted to have a heart attack, I’ve lived in the right places.”

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You always hate to see a keynote speaker pull out of a major conference attracting wide attention, especially when the conference is focused on a hot emerging field like algae-based technologies and the speaker is J. Craig Venter, the renowned human genome pioneer and founding CEO of San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics.

The brash Venter, who rarely appears in public these days, has gained even higher visibility since mid-July, when he announced Synthetic Genomics has a new partnership with ExxonMobile, which plans to invest $600 million to develop algae-derived biofuels.

At least he has a good excuse.

Instead of speaking to the masses attending the 3rd Annual Algae Biomass Summit in downtown San Diego, Venter will be attending a White House ceremony, where he is receiving a National Medal of Science from President Obama. A recent statement issued by the J. Craig Venter Institute says the medal is intended to recognize Venter’s dedication to “the advancement of the science of genomics, his contributions to the understanding of its implications for society, and his commitment to the clear communication of information to the scientific community, the public, and policymakers.” The medal is the highest scientific honor bestowed by the U.S. government.

Venter’s replacement as keynote speaker Wednesday is Paul Roessler, Synthetic Genomics’ vice president for renewable fuels and chemicals.

Conference organizers also announced last week that Jacque Beaudry-Losique, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Renewable Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, will be the luncheon keynote speaker on Thursday. The three-day conference at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina ends Friday.

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Boston-based synthetic biology startup Ginkgo BioWorks has been selected as one of two entities to support a Scottish initiative to find better ways to assemble synthetic DNA, according to ITI Life Sciences, which has committed $4.1 million to the effort. ITI Life Sciences is a unit of ITI Scotland, a firm that was formed in 2003 by the government of Scotland to help grow industries in the country such as life sciences, energy, and digital media. Ginkgo BioWorks was launched in 2008 by five MIT scientists and researchers to make the construction of synthetic DNA easier and faster, according to its website.

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Seattle-based Bio Architecture Lab, a stealthy spinout from the University of Washington, has raised $3.4 million in equity funding out of a $6 million offering, according to a regulatory filing. Michael Borrus of Menlo Park, CA-based X/Seed Capital is listed on the form as a director, which suggests that X/Seed participated in the funding round. But the form says there are two investors, and the other is unnamed. Reached for comment this morning, Bio Architecture Lab CEO Nikesh Parekh said the company is not talking to the media yet.

Bio Architecture Lab raised $1.5 million from X/Seed last year. (X/Seed is loosely related to Mohr Davidow Ventures.) The company has said it applies computational enzyme design and synthetic biology to produce biofuels and renewable chemicals from novel, sustainable biomass sources—the advantage being that these products cost much less than fuels and chemicals made from traditional sources like corn or sugarcane. The technology was originally spun out of the lab of prominent UW biochemist David Baker, whom Luke profiled here.

The latest funding seems to at least partially validate the efforts of the UW TechTransfer program in connecting venture capitalists with commercially promising technologies from university labs. More specifically, it is a significant step forward for commercial applications of Baker’s research, which has also spawned another Seattle startup working with enzymes, Arzeda.

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What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? The Internet, television, antibiotics, automobiles, electricity, nuclear power, space travel, and cloning—these inventions were born out of dreams, persistence, and imagination.

What game-changing ideas can we expect to see in OUR lifetimes?

As each year winds to a close, John Brockman, a literary agent representing some of the finest minds in science and technology and the founder of Edge Foundation, poses a provocative question to an international community of physicists, psychologists, futurists, thought leaders, and dreamers. Brockman is a master convener, both online and in real life. This year’s annual Edge question, What will change everything?, generated responses from Freeman Dyson, Danny Hillis, Martin Seligman, Craig Venter, and Juan Enriquez, to name a few. Here are a few highlights.

Venter imagines creating life from synthetic materials and expects that our view of life, itself, will be transformed.

Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek believes everything will continue to become smaller, faster, cooler, and cheaper—with implications of an Internet on steroids and exciting new designer materials.

Several neuroscientists wrote about everything from direct communication of feelings and thoughts from brain to brain to electrical brain stimulation for the treatment of mood disorders to cheap cryonic suspension of brains to ways to control brain plasticity.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Verena Huber-Dyson see science evolving beyond analytical focus and including a sense of synthesis. Huber-Dyson envisions the end of fragmentation of knowledge.

George Dyson, science historian, author, kayak-designer, and builder, looks toward the stars, or here on Earth, suggesting, “the detection of extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence or extraterrestrial technology will change everything.”

Discover magazine editor in chief, Corey S. Powell, offers a list of possibilities from synthetic telepathy to genetically engineered kids.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.”

Tap your greatness as we welcome 2009!

Enjoy reading responses to the Edge annual question here, and please comment on the question yourself: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

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