1.Craig Venter's one-man algae fuels bubble
2.One-Third of Americans Back Ban on Synthetic Biology
3.Berkeley-BP Deal Only Looks Worse Post-Spill
EXTRACT: "The truth is, neither [Venter nor Keasling] will succeed in replacing petroleum for many reasons, including the fact that [genetically modified organisms] are not as robust as wild species." (item 1)
NOTE: Related articles:
*Biofuels, BP-Berkeley, and the New Ecological Imperialism: http://ht.ly/2CCFo
*Gates, BP and DiFi's spouse buy into company using genetic engineering to produce biofuels: http://bit.ly/bSbzjn
*Democracy Now: Why is Oil Giant BP Helping Develop California Schools Environmental Curriculum? http://bit.ly/bVndFr
*BP, the fox in the public school henhouse: http://bit.ly/cCieQ
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1.Craig Venter's one-man algae fuels bubble
Steve LeVine
Foreign Policy, September 7 2010
http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/07/craig_venters_one_man_algae_fuels_bubble_0
It's good to be J. Craig Venter right now. In May, Venter -- who you may recall from his entrepreneurial work in genomics research -- created a stir in scientific circles by creating the first cell with synthetic DNA; Exxon, meanwhile, has gone on the hook for up to $600 million in funding for Venter's ambitious synthetic algae fuel project. In a piece over the weekend, The New York Times' Andrew Pollack has added some James Dean brushstrokes to the portrait of this "scientific rebel." Shall we cut to the chase and start carving busts of the guy?
There's no doubt that algae-based fuel is tantalizing -- unlike crops, trees, the sun and wind, algae starts out already half-comprised of hydrocarbons useable for bio-diesel, as Debora MacKenzie writes at New Scientist. That's why Silicon Valley, the Pentagon and serious oil companies are attempting to crack the code and scale up algae into a global transportation fuel. And if you ask the chin- and chest-out Venter, his own efforts are headed for tickertape-parade-type success: "Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution," he told Pollack. "The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry."
Them's fighting words. However, I am intrigued by the doubts expressed by Jay Keasling [Key player in the BP-Berkeley deal - item 3 below], another member of the rock star scientist club examining the alternative fuel puzzle. "I don't know how many decades his funders have given him," Keasling says in the Pollack piece -- meaning, bluntly, that, in Keasling's view, the task that the 63-year-old Venter has set out for himself may exceed his time on Earth.
Algae fuel is being made, and used, but expensively. Over the summer, EADS, the Paris-based aviation company, flew one engine in a small two-engine plane on algae fuel. As Siobhan Warner wrote in The Engineer, EADS had to scour the entire globe in order to round up enough performance-grade algae fuel for this single flight. Jean Botti, EADS chief technical officer, told Warner:
"I had to go all around the world to find the best guys that could deliver a good quality product that we could refine. This is why we had to fly a little airplane. I couldn't fly on a large Airbus aircraft with those algaes because I did not have enough quantity for all the testing and certification."
More skepticism is aroused when one considers Exxon's full-throated public relations effort on behalf of its investment. One of the world's most conservative and secretive companies, Exxon generally releases data in such a manner not as a matter of course, but only when doing so serves a political purpose. In the weeks before Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, for example, CEO Rex Tillerson -- dead certain like the rest of corporate America that cap-and-trade was coming -- sought to distance Exxon further from the negative attention it attracted for funding the global-warming-is-a-hoax movement; Tillerson told a packed room at the Wilson Center in Washington that Exxon was backing a form of carbon pricing: a carbon tax. About a month before that, Exxon took out a full-page ad in the New York Times touting its work to advance batteries and electric cars. And then we have its super high-profile venture with Venter. I will be interested to watch Exxon's PR activities
now that the green movement is in retreat.
Venter gets the Mick Jagger treatment because of his past as a genomic guru. For some insight into why and how that translates over into the algae world, I emailed Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones, the CEO of a competing algae company in California called LiveFuels. She at once zeroed in on the Keasling quote. "Jay is a rock star, but Craig is a galaxy. No one on Earth has generated more important data than has Craig," she said.
But Morgenthaler-Jones also poured cold water on the scaled-up potential for genetically modified algae. "When it comes to replacing petroleum, the whole discussion of synthetic cells is a red herring," she said.
"The truth is, neither [Venter nor Keasling] will succeed in replacing petroleum for many reasons, including the fact that [genetically modified organisms] are not as robust as wild species. But what may be the biggest reason was covered by Foreign Policy months ago - the looming phosphate shortage."
Morgenthaler-Jones was referring to the requirement in algae production of huge volumes of phosphate, which is becoming scarce.
Morgenthaler-Jones's husband, Dave, who is COO of LiveFuels, adds that algae companies, including Venter, cannot be assumed to be aiming at making fuel. Plastics, Jones says, earn much more money than biodiesel:
"When (not if, because the proofs exist) we can convince algae (or yeast or bacteria) to make useful hydrocarbons, why would we make the lowest-value products (fuel)? It's said that something like 5%-10% of a barrel of oil goes to the higher-value products (plastics, etc.). So if world-wide consumption of oil is about 30 billion barrels a year, 1.5 billion to 3 billion barrels goes to such products. That's a pretty big set of markets to saturate before you waste time making fuel."
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2.One-Third of Americans Back Ban on Synthetic Biology
Jeremy Hsu
LiveScience, 9 September 2010
http://www.livescience.com/health/synthetic-biology-manmade-life-100909.html
Engineering new synthetic organisms offers promise of fighting disease and even global warming, but also comes with risk. Now two-thirds of Americans surveyed in a new poll say the field should move forward, while one-third supports a ban until researchers better understand the possible consequences.
The field, called synthetic biology, worries some due to its possible impacts related to biological weapons and potentially harmful health effects on humans.
President Obama has ordered a presidential commission to figure out what role government should play in both encouraging and regulating synthetic biology research. Just over half of the 1,000 poll participants said the U.S. government should regulate, while only 36 percent believed in relying on voluntary guidelines developed jointly by industry and government.
That majority belief in government regulation matches views about nanotechnology that emerged in earlier polls by Hart Research Associates and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
"The message then and now is that there's not a lot of public trust in the industry to self-regulate," said David Rejeski, director of the science and technology innovation program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Synthetic biology gained recent attention when researchers led by J. Craig Venter announced they had transplanted a synthetic genome into a living cell in May.
Harnessing biological tools
Venter's group has also begun working with the National Institutes of Health to make synthetic components of every flu vaccine ever sequenced. That would allow researchers to whip up seed candidates for flu vaccines within 24 hours an application supported by six out of 10 poll participants.
"The vaccine issue is one that was publicly mentioned and obviously would have significant implications if you rolled it out, because it would touch millions of people," Rejeski told LiveScience.
But using synthetic biology to speed up growth of livestock for more food production drew a much more negative response. Three out of four of people surveyed had concerns about such an application.
That finding again agrees with earlier poll results about nanotechnology, which involves manipulating nonorganic materials on a very tiny scale. People had no problem with antimicrobial nanotech linings for food containers, but seemed far more worried about nanotech particles inside actual food.
"The closer the technology gets to your mouth, the more people get concerned about it," Rejeski explained.
The Food and Drug Administration has already begun considering approval of genetically modified Atlantic salmon that grows more quickly and reaches a larger size than its ordinary cousins. Such salmon came from traditional genetic engineering, which manipulates genes that already exist, but synthetic biology could aim for similar achievements by using human-made genetic sequences.
Letting go of all your worries
People who cited moral issues about creating artificial life tended to reject both the flu vaccine and livestock applications. Convincing that group otherwise could prove difficult, given that the poll also showed a strong tie between greater religious belief and concerns about synthetic biology.
"You are going to have people who are just going to reject the science based on moral concerns, and I don't think you're going to move them," Rejeski said.
Still, moral issues represented just one of three top concerns listed by poll participants.
Top concerns split almost equally between possible use of synthetic biology to create biological weapons (27 percent), moral issues with creating artificial life (25 percent), and negative health effects for humans (23 percent). A smaller group of 13 percent listed damage to the environment as their biggest concern.
Several notable groups emerged that supported the idea of banning further research, at least until more research uncovers the possible risks. Those include 52 percent of African-Americans, 43 percent of Hispanics, 43 percent of evangelicals, and 40 percent of women polled. (Of course there may be overlap between categories.)
Moving ahead
Views on how to regulate synthetic biology research split unsurprisingly along political lines. Democrats favored government regulation over voluntary guidelines by 64 percent to 28 percent, while independents did the same by 49 percent versus 37 percent. Republicans seemed divided with 42 percent favoring government regulation and 44 percent supporting voluntary guidelines.
Any future decisions about how to regulate such research will in part depend on public knowledge and attitudes. People who had greater awareness of synthetic biology tended to report more positive attitudes toward future research.
But that does not mean experts can expect to simply educate the public and raise acceptance of synthetic biology. Poll participants also moved toward the idea that synthetic biology presented more risk than benefit after they read balanced information about the pros and cons of the science.
From Aug. 16-22, Hart Research Associates conducted anationwide survey among 1,000 adults about awareness of and attitudes toward syntheticbiology and two potential applications of the science.
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3.Berkeley-BP Deal Only Looks Worse Post-Spill
Miguel Altieri
Daily Californian, 26 July 2010
http://www.dailycal.org/article/109882/berkeley-bp_deal_only_looks_worse_post-spill
In 2007, British Petroleum donated $500 million in research funds to UC Berkeley and partners to develop new sources of energy - primarily biotechnology to produce biofuel crops. Robert A. Malone, chairman and president of BP America Inc proclaimed BP was "joining some of the world's best science and engineering talent for � improving and expanding the production of clean, renewable energy through the development of better crops." With what for BP was a relatively small investment, UC Berkeley's academic expertise, built over decades of public support, was recruited into a corporate partnership at the service of private interests. In fact in the Energy Biosciences Institute's 2009 annual report the Director was not shy in stating that "the mission of the institute is to provide ideas and innovations that supports the company's commitment to find new, more sustainable energy technologies." But all this public recruited talent did not help BP in preventing nor containing the oil spill that gushed more than 90 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days, constituting the worst ecological disaster in US history.
This Berkeley-BP deal was signed without wide consultation with the faculty and despite warnings from a great number of faculty opposing such deal, UC Berkeley's administration chose to disregard the fact that BP is the oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in the United States. British Petroleum has been the subject of roughly 8,000 reported incidents of spills, emissions and leaks of oil, chemicals and gases into the environment.
The ecological costs of the oil spill yet to be revealed, will certainly result in the decline of dolphins, whale sharks and sea turtles, whose populations may not recover for years. Fish and shrimp-breeding habitats will have been destroyed. Deep coral reefs, which can take centuries to grow, will surely be affected, not to mention the livelihoods of thousands of people that depend on the Gulf's marine and coastal resources. Even if BP pays the full cost of damages, this sum which will cause little strain on BP's finances, will not cover the long-term and unpredictable ecological impacts that will last well beyond the time when lawsuits have been settled.
But the ecological crisis of the Gulf started many years before the oil spill. Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize corn leaches from Midwest croplands into the Mississippi River and out into the gulf, where the fertilizer feeds giant algae blooms. As the algae dies, it settles to the ocean floor and decays, consuming oxygen and suffocating marine life. The Gulf's dead zone is an area roughly the size of New Jersey. No doubt that the oil spill will worsen the shallow-water dead zone.
What is certain, however, is that the size of the dead zone fluctuates seasonally, as it is exacerbated by modern farming practices. The final irony is that BP's funded biofuel research at Berkeley is contributing to expand the "dead zone" by promoting large scale monoculture production of corn needed to yield the projected crop mass for ethanol, which requires the use of huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, major culprit for algal blooms and depletion of dissolved oxygen in coastal areas.
The potential consequences for the environment and society of BP's funded research on biofuels at Berkeley are deeply disturbing. Many scientists have long predicted that the large-scale industrial boom in biofuels will be disastrous for farmers, the environment and consumers and now marine ecosystems.
Under the circumstances, how can UC Berkeley justify in front of California's civil society its association with BP? A serious public debate on this whole program is overdue not only to hold the university accountable for its corporate funded research, but to explore initiatives that support truly sustainable and socially responsible alternatives to the energy and environmental crisis affecting the planet. It is time to apply the section of the UCB-BP agreement which refers to termination by Berkeley or other research collaborators, which reads: "In recognition of the public institutional nature of Berkeley, LBNL, and Illinois, if a discrete event were to occur or a change in facts and circumstances were to arise after the date of this Agreement, that Berkeley or any one or all of the other Research Collaborators were to reasonably determine that a continued association with EBI was not in accord with its fundamental principles, then at any time within one hundred eighty (180) days after the occurrence of such event Berkeley may terminate this Agreement"
I would argue that a major change in facts and circumstances has already occurred.