So Craig Venter's "creation" of life is threatening to destroy the earth, or so a curious alliance of the Daily Mail and greenies would have us believe. In fact, all Venter has done is copy some DNA as a new strand and injected it into pre-existing cells - an impressive achievement but of itself not radical. In any case, far from bringing global germ warfare perilously closer, as the Mail and the veggie brigade would have us believe, it makes absolutely no difference. Maybe the Greens and Angry of Tunbridge Wells have never heard of smallpox, anthrax, Ebola, West Nile fever, typhus.... Whatever Venter may be guilty of, you can't blame him for stockpiling huge quantities of the above and weaponising them.
What exactly is Venter guilty of? The worst that anyone can say is that he mixes science with business. Considering that the man completed the human genome sequencing project in less than half the time projected by the academics who were planning to do the same thing, I'd say he has given the human race more than a decade's head start on preparing treatments and cures for genetic illnesses. How many lives has he saved? How many millions of man-years of suffering has he alleviated? More than the Mail's Paul Dacre, I'll bet.
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