Adam Bluestein

Were you not among the select few invited (list is in the link below) to attend the Edge Master Class called “A Short Course on Synthetic Genomics,” in Silicon Valley last week and organized by science super-book agent John Brockman, there’s six hours of it here on video. The presenters are Harvard’s George Church and genomic entrepreneur J. Craig Venter, both of whom I’ve written about here before. While they have quite different personal styles and reputations, it’s safe to say that both are keen promoters of the promise of synthetic biology and are similar in that both are doing groundbreaking work on DNA sequencing as well as cell engineering. Both are exceedingly well spoken, thoughtful, and real powerhouses. So, it’s not an overstatement to say that this is something like having Bill Gates and Steve Jobs giving a presentation on the future of personal computing back somewhere in the mid-1970s. Enjoy.