Wednesday, May 5, 2010

At his request, had meeting in my office with J. Craig Venter. He wanted to brief me and get my advice on how to handle the rollout of his upcoming Science paper on Synthetic Biology. He has made a major advance in synthesizing from the sequence in a computer the 1.1 million base pairs of Mycoplasma mycoides and inserted it into a Mycoplasma capricolum bacteria. The synthetic mycoides then began to code for the proteins of the bacterial cell wall so that after several replications there was a bacteria with a synthetic genome and all of the protein coded for by the synthetic genome, thus a synthetic cell. I advised him to be very transparent at this and present it to the NAS, the OSTP, among others. He has lined up some embargoed press in anticipation of the release next week of the paper on May 13. He very much wanted me to do heavy press with him likely to add a greater degree of credibility to it as well as because I explain science so well. From today until the House Hearing on May 27, HHS and the White House completely muzzled me for ridiculous reasons. Despite the fact that John Holdren submitted my name to the WH as the best person to do TV, radio and print, the WH muzzled all government comment on this. They were “afraid to elevate it publicly by having well-known government figures speak about it since they did not want flack from the “right” that the government was involved in “creating” life. Unbelievable!! Rick Weiss who is communications director for OSTP is extremely distraught about the muzzling. Of note, this has happened to me throughout the H1N1 flu pandemic. Apparently, besides Jenny Backus, more importantly, David Pfeiffer at the White House is now behind the muzzling.