The Irish Times - Friday, July 13, 2012

DICK AHLSTROM, Science Editor

THE LINE separating the digital world and the biological world is blurring and may soon fade away. It will lead to a time when our personal biology will be transmitted across the internet at the speed of light, the geneticist Dr Craig Venter has said.

We are in waht I call the digital age of biology, he told a packed out audience assembled in the examination hall on the Trinity College campus, an event taking place as part of the ongoing EuroScience Open Forum based at the Convention Centre Dublin.

He pictured a time in the not too distant future when digitised biological samples collected at an influenza outbreak could be transmitted to a laboratory and analysed to identify a vaccine target.

The result would in turn be transmitted to vaccine manufacturers around the world to stop a pandemic before it could start. This is biology moving at the speed of light, Dr Venter said.

His talk, entitled: What is Life?, was a reprise of a series of lectures first given in 1943 at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies by physicist Erwin Schrdinger.

Although a physicist, Schrdinger delivered an lecture on the processes that control life, talks that later went on to inspire a generation of biologists.

One such biologist attended yesterdays talk, Nobel Prize winner James Watson. Also present was the Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who in a piece of interlocking history attended last nights lecture at Trinity just as his predecessor of 1943 had, one Eamon de Valara.

Dr Venter opened his address by declaring it was a considerable honour to be asked to deliver the presentation. He talked about the lectures and their impact, pointing out that the notion of a DNA code was first used by Schrdinger in his description of a code script.

Originally posted here:
Leading geneticist heralds digital age of biology