VentureBeat

It’s finally all about him.By “him,” of course, we mean J. Craig Venter, the iconoclastic scientist who had his entire genome sequenced, posted in a public database, and analyzed in a scientific paper published Monday in the online journal PLoS Biology. Dave Hamilton writes about it at VentureBeat LifeSciences, and what it means.

Hamilton’s bottom line: “We may share only about 99.5 percent of our DNA with other people, instead of the 99.9 percent that many scientists estimated several years back. Stop the presses!”

(UPDATED: See below.)

Revisiting a few life-science stories you might have missed over the weekend:

“Baby Einstein” creator’s defense: We were just kidding! — You have to feel at least a little sorry for Julie Aigner-Clark, the entrepreneur who created the best-selling line of “Baby Einstein” videos for infants and toddlers and then sold her company to Walt Disney five years ago. After University of Washington researchers suggested that the videos may retard language development in babies aged eight months to 16 months, Aigner-Clark basically had two choices: Challenge the study on its merits, or acknowledge that her entire enterprise was essentially a sham.

Surprisingly, Aigner-Clark chose the second route, and now says the videos were never intended to make children smarter. (So much for the company’s one-time slogan, “Great minds start little.”) In this AP story, courtesy of Forbes, Aigner-Clark insists that the videos, which predominantly pair toy images with cheesily simplified classical-music arrangements, were simply intended to expose babies to “beautiful things” such as art, music and poetry. “I believe we’ve done what we’ve always set out to do — expose kids to great things,” Aigner-Clark told the AP. “And when used the right way, by interacting with a parent or a guardian, they’re positive ways to engage your child.”

In other words, parents, you’ve been duped, and Aigner-Clark is more than happy to rub your face in it. Aigner-Clark’s chutzpah, however, doesn’t justify the abusive behavior some people have apparently leveled in her direction; the AP story notes that someone vandalized her mailbox with the spray-painted words “Baby Dumb.”

Why the elderly can face “death by medication” — This Sydney Morning Herald story argues that the side effects of many prescription drugs are effectively poisoning many elderly people, in part because no one really keeps track of how the many drugs older people are often taking at once interact with one another. The article tells the story of Don Ireland, a spry 91-year-old who nevertheless almost lost his will to live until a doctor weaned him from 14 drugs, leaving him on three.

From the story:

At the heart of the problem is a collision of two forces, says David Le Couteur, professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Sydney, and the director of the Centre for Education and Research on Ageing at Concord Hospital. “We have pharmaceutical companies, and doctors with conflicts of interest, who make a huge amount of money from drugs; and people who expect to live for ever and be well for ever - and they feed off each other.”

Because of their medication, many elderly patients suffer unnecessarily. They feel sick, nauseous, confused; their memory deteriorates; they suffer incontinence; they may suffer hemorrhages in the stomach or brain; they fall; they are referred to nursing homes.

(Hat tip: Pharmalot.)

Artificial life may be closer than you think — Scientists interviewed by the AP believe that someone will create a living single-celled organism from scratch for the first time within the next three to ten years. Doing so essentially means clearing three hurdles: Building an artificial cell membrane, synthesizing a working genome from basic building blocks, and hooking everything up to metabolic processes that can extract energy from the environment and deploy it to perform useful tasks. And scientists are already close to overcoming one or more of those challenges.

Of course, if you believe J. Craig Venter, he and his research team are almost there already. For a useful corrective to Venter’s often wildly overblown and always self-interested hype, see this July Forbes story by Matthew Herper. (Tellingly, Venter doesn’t appear in the AP piece.) UPDATE: He does appear in a companion piece, though. See below.

Biogen Idec’s CEO Jim Mullen on the future of biotech — In a lengthy interview with Robert Buderi of Xconomy.com (part one is here, part two is here), Biogen Idec CEO Jim Mullen waxes philosophical on what he sees as a coming era of rapid biotech-led advances in medicine, energy, agriculture and other areas. The executive also shares his thoughts on big issues such as patent reform and biogenerics — he doesn’t say a lot that’s terribly new, but it’s a useful primer if you’re interested in those issues. Pharmalot has a more detailed summary.

UPDATE: Craig Venter’s PR representative points out to us that he was interviewed by AP reporter Seth Borenstein for the piece linked above, and that he appears in the full version of the story. (You can see that full version here, I believe, although it’s always hard to tell with the AP, which frequently moves multiple versions of its own stories that are then often edited by daily newspapers and other outlets for their own purposes.) In any event, it now looks like it was the editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and not AP editors or reporters, who chose to cut Venter from that piece in the course of shortening it — not to mention changing the focus considerably. Apologies for any confusion.

UPDATE REDUX: As if this wasn’t confusing enough already, it looks like the AP’s Seth Borenstein did two separate articles related to artificial life on the same day. The one I originally linked to ran with the headline “Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years” and ran in a variety of papers, including the San Jose Mercury News and the Boston Globe. (Check Google News for more examples.) Venter doesn’t appear in this piece.

A longer Borenstein article addressing the philosophical issues raised by artificial-life research also ran in a number of places, including USA Today and the Houston Chronicle. This is the story I linked to in the first update, and it does mention Venter.

Bottom line: Venter’s PR person jumped the gun. My original point stands, although the same AP reporter did interview Venter and quoted him in a related piece. Similarly, the Seattle P-I didn’t cut Venter out of the story it chose to run. And now that this update is far longer than the original item, I’ll draw this to a close.

FINAL UPDATE: It’s now clear that “tellingly” was a poor choice of words. I’ve spoken to the AP’s Borenstein, who graciously pointed out that the piece I linked was specifically focused on artificial-life “purists” who are trying to build microbes from scratch. Venter, who is more interested in manipulating existing life forms — such as by swapping one microbe’s genome for another — didn’t qualify. Borenstein also confirmed that this research piece was originally a sidebar to the longer article on the philosophical implications of artificial life, and not a shortened version of the longer piece.

And now I hope I’m done.

Here’s the latest (ahem) action:

Second Life avatar sues another avatar, over virtual sex bed — We should have predicted this. Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Second Life resident Volkov Catteneo. This is apparently the first time an avatar has sued another avatar in the virtual world. Alderman, who has made money before in Second Life by selling a virtual island for $50,000 (real money), says his avatar, Stroker Serpentine was doing quite well selling a SexGen bed, which allows avatars to have sex, for L$12,000 (US $45.11), but that Catteneo has copied it and is selling it for a third of the price.

Geni uses viral messaging to grow quickly – Family-tree company Geni (our
review) claims five million profiles have been created by users in five months. The secret? Instead of making you sign-up, and then start creating a family-tree, it combines the two steps. Its user interface cleverly inserts your initial data into your first family tree — leading a new user to immediately begin inviting their family members to also build out the family tree. We noted in March that the site had over 100,000 users that had added about 2 million profiles; this was when the company closed a funding round valuing it at around $100 million. The surge in growth since then can only be good news for the investors.

Bill Gates’ investment arm backs Gay.com — His Cascade Investment Group invests $26.2 million into the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender online community PlanetOut, which owns Gay.com. More from John Cook in Seattle.

Russia shuts down Allofmp3.com, or tries to at least — Russia shut the music download website, a leader in music and video piracy, to placate the U.S. concerns about Russia’s copyright protection policies. However, an alternative site run by the same Moscow company has emerged: Mp3Sparks.com.

Netvibes, one of the more popular start-page companies, sees departure — With Google and other big players pushing their own start-pages (pages that you can customize and make your home page as you surf the Web), there’s growing tension at the many start-up companies that launched similar features early on. Paris-based Netvibes has lost Pierre Chappaz, who was co-CEO and said he had disagreements on strategies of “distribution and monetization.” See his post here.

Helio reportedly to get more life-support — Earthlink and South Korea’s SK Telecom plan to pump $100 million each in Helio, their money-losing U.S. mobile telecom network. Helio is a so-called MVNO, or networks that pay to use the infrastructure of other carriers to offer their services, and they’ve had a poor track record. Amp’d Mobile recently filed for bankruptcy, and ESPN’s mobile network failed. Helio is getting costly. It has already soaked up $440 million, and expects a net loss of $330 million to $360 million this year, compared with a $192 million shortfall in 2006.

Netsuite 74 percent owned by Larry Ellison, and it competes with Oracle — Netsuite, software company that just filed to go public, undercuts Oracle by selling dirt-cheap online software for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for CRM (Customer Relationship Management). And yet it is 61 percent owned by Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle. Ellison owned another 13 percent, which he has given to trusts related to his family. Netsuite’s products sell at a loss. (See WSJ story for more; subscription required).

KKR is latest buyout firm to file for IPO — KKR has filed for an IPO that will let it raise $1.25 billion. This follows the much hyped IPO of another buyout firm, Blackstone. Lately, the sector has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, who are now considering levying a new tax on buyout professionals. Blackstone’s stock has dropped 4.1 percent since its IPO. Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson have pocketed $2.56 billion between them. Now, will individual investors fall for another buyout IPO? Probably.

Yahoo’s personalized SmartAds — Yahoo has released new ad tools that allow for better “behavioral targeting.” Called SmartAds, they let advertisers create custom ads, using information Yahoo has about where the user is located and which sites they are visiting. The NYT has a good description of how it works:

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement. For airlines, SmartAds uses Yahoo’s information about its Web surfers to create display advertisements for each person that feature ticket offers with actual prices listed. In time, Yahoo plans to offer rich media advertisements where users can buy the ticket at that price right within the ad unit, rather than having to click through to another Web site.

Departures at Technorati — The blog search engine, which has lost some of is focus lately, has suffered three more departures. The company’s chief executive Dave Sifry said its top engineers Adam Hertz and Tantek Celik have gone. They had been there for three years, and were responsible for Technorati’s effective evangelizing of its tags and of microformats. Two months ago, the company drew another $1 million from its investors. The departures are a setback; we reached out to Technorati and Tantek for comment, but neither responded. Also, product manager Liz Dunn, who had helped build the company’s latest site, has left, to join Will Farrell’s comedy video site FunnyOrDie, backed by Sequoia.

EBay opens US version of its classifieds site Kijiji — Auction site EBay has quietly opened the cute-sounding classifieds Web site, a clone of Craigslist, in all 50 states (see WSJ story, subscription required). The service had been operating in Canada, Europe and Asia. Its name, though, is harder to spell, and there’s not much difference from Craigslist. Posting is free, but the company will explore ways of charging for display ads and premium services for sellers. This is notable, too, because eBay owns 25 percent of Craigslist. EBay owns a number of other classifieds site in other countries.

Feedburner makes two premium services free — After getting bought by Google, Feedburner is offering for free its Stats PRO service, which provides statistics such as click-through tracking and podcast downloads; and its MyBrand service, which allows users to control the URL of their feed. See Search Engine Land for more details. Danny Sullivan wrote about the importance of owning your feed name here.

Craig Venter’s company transplants entire genome from one bacterium cell to another — This technique could possibly lead to the creation of ‘designer’ microbes producing fuel or help cleaning toxic waste. The company has a way to go yet. The ultimate plan is to stitch together artificial chromosomes, proteins and other building blocks with the aim of jumpstarting their designer microbe to life. (More here.)

T-Mobile’s phone, lost in the iPhone hype — T-Mobile picked a tough week to release its own new phone service. Offered on Samsung and Noka phones, the service lets you place and receive calls over both the regular T-Mobile GSM network and virtually any WiFi wireless network. Called HotSpot@Home, it uses a technology called UMA (unlicensed mobile access). It lets you switch seamlessly between the two networks. It’s quite expensive (minimum $50 a month), so you’d have to be a power user for this to make sense. Calls originating from WiFi zones are free (don’t go against minutes). It works in Starbucks hotspots, without forcing you to log in. It doesn’t work in other areas with registration pages, such as airports, however. Good for use abroad, too, since WiFi calls are free. More details from Larry Magid and the NYT’s Pogue.

Korea’s LG agrees to develop a YouTube-focused mobile phone — LG said the model will allow users to upload, view and share video clips without the need to use a computer. The 3G phone will be offered first in Europe in the second half of this year (Forbes). LG began selling “Google phones” in Europe last month with software installed for directly using the Google service. It offers one-click access to Google’s search engine, Gmail and Google maps.

Videocountner lets you track how may time your video has been watched across various sites — The sites tracked by the service include YouTube, Revver, Daily Motion, MySpace and iFilm (via Techcrunch).

HP’s Presto photo service for elderly isn’t working — It was supposed to be really easy to use, allowing people to set it up for the elderly relatives to receive photos. But the Mercury News’ Dean Takahashi says it doesn’t work. After two tries, his mother gave up. We covered the company here. The Mountain View, Calif. company has $10 million in backing from Kleiner Perkins and Clearstone.

Craig Venter, the controversial entrepreneur who led the private-sector effort to sequence the human genome, is now seeking a patent for a “minimal genome,” a type of synthetic biology aimed at creating life forms, or living “machines.”

It may even be used for creating ethanol or other biofuels, something that several other companies are working on.

The US patent application (see the application here), filed by Hamilton Smith and colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, claims ownership of a set of less than 400 genes required to sustain a free-living microbe. According to a New Scientist article:

The patent states that a synthetic genome bearing the genes could be inserted into a bacterium stripped of its own DNA. The idea is that this bacterium will become a “chassis” for synthetic biology, used to carry genetic circuits with novel functions. The patent also claims a specific application: producing ethanol or hydrogen for fuel.

There’s more coverage about Venter’s efforts here.

Synthetic fuel is something Amyris in Emeryville, Calif. backed by Kleiner Perkins and well-known investor Vinod Khosla is also trying to do, as we reported here. Khosla has backed LS9.com, which is doing something similar.