It is in the ordained order of things on Capitol Hill that Congress shall, more often than not, hold hearings when large scientific splashes are made. Thus did the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Democrat Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, convene this morning to hear from J. Craig Venter the details of his latest coup: the manufacture and insertion of a fully synthetic bacterial genome into a closely-related cell which then booted up and began life’s processes according to the directions of that genome. The details were published in Science last week, with attendant fanfare, leaving members of Congress eager for a first-hand briefing by Venter and other experts including Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, and Jay Keasling, the acting deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who directs the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center at the University of California Berkeley. More>A story on this topic also appeared in the New York Times.
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