When you’ve skyrocketed into the public eye, become an overnight billionaire, and successfully mapped the human genome, what do you do next? Why, find the solution to global warming, of course. J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist who gave the federal government’s Human Genome Project a run for its money and accelerated the pace of DNA sequencing by many years, now plans to figure out a way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and thereby slow global warming. Venter is in the process of setting up the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives and plans to seek government funding for research on technological and biological (as opposed to, say political or behavioral) solutions to environmental problems. Venter is especially interested in bacteria found in recent years in deep ocean trenches that may be able to convert CO2 back into solid form without needing much energy.
