Engineering Biofuels

Fareed Zakaria interviews Craig Venter, the leader of the successful private initiative to map the human genome, about his current efforts to engineer microorganisms to produce fuels.

Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future?
Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.

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How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.

You always have to take predictions with a grain of salt, but this guy has gotten results before. I hope they really are making good progress.