Snoop Dogg, Or J. Craig Venter?
Unless you're an English major, I assume you've probably heard of J. Craig Venter before. If you haven't, you should. His company Celera Genomics tied the government-funded consortium in the race to sequence the human genome (this is still disputed, actually -- Venter says he did beat the consortium). Moreover, he's a pioneer in synthetic biology. As I've said before, food and fuel are the most important scientific and technological challenges of our century. We desperately need new sources of bioenergy that can help us wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and that's the kind of thing Venter is working on. Put simply -- he's a scientist doing some really interesting work. But that's not enough to satisfy some people. Like who? Well, English majors. read more
