Synthetic way
Colonising Mars
A photo of Mars from NASA's Viking spacecraft, which launched in 1975
Synthetic organisms engineered to use carbon dioxide as a raw material could help humans settle Mars one day, a prominent biologist says. Man-made, CO2-munching lifeforms are already in the works, geneticist Craig Venter told a crowd here during an event called TEDxNASA@SiliconValley Wednesday night (Aug. 17). Venter and his team, who made headlines last year by creating the world's first synthetic organism, are trying to design cells that can use atmospheric carbon dioxide to make food, fuel, plastics and other products. This ability would obviously have huge implications here on Earth, but it could also help make Mars whose thin atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide a more livable place, Venter said. "These kinds of processes will allow us to make almost anything needed there from that CO2 environment," Venter said in a video presentation. Venter and his team announced in May 2010 that they had created the first living organism with a synthetic genome. The biologists constructed the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides from many preassembled units of DNA. Then they transplanted the genome into the cell of a closely related species that had been emptied of its own genome. The "host" bacterium soon began to function and reproduce just as a naturally occurring M. mycoides would.
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