Forget Jesus sandals. The recent surge of interest in biochemist Craig Venter has overwritten time-honoured notions of the earth-born god. Gone is the modest immaterialist: in his place stands a surfing dude with a sailing yacht named The Sorcerer and his eyes set on what he touts as the next multi-trillion-dollar industry. He even has a one-up on water into wine. Thin air into fuel.
Is Venter playing God… is God playing with Venter… The media debate, which peaked for me with the concern expressed by one atheist Guardian-reader "that a crazed evangelist may use the technology to create God", has been a lot of fun.
But it has also missed the point. Which is not whether Venter's synthetic addition to the earth's inventory of species is the eighth day of creation – or whether it is no more than a slightly obscure feat in computer-programming. The exciting part is that Venter wants to harness his creative powers to give the world a biologically engineered, renewable fuel – one he claims could scale up to rival the petrochemical industries.