TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The Times’s Wil Hylton has a terrific profile of Craig Venter, who helped map the human genome and is now working on creating synthetic life that can accomplish specific tasks:

Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war.

Save it to Instapaper and read it through. Bioengineering, or whatever you want to call this kind of work, is fascinating to me because of the incredible potential it holds—eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels, significantly reducing carbon emissions, making agriculture much more efficient—but also the potential for terrible unintended results. Synthetic viruses or bacteria could easily be used as a weapon, and viruses or bacteria intended for benign purposes could cause all kinds of unforeseen damage.

This kind of work is going to shape the coming decades and we need to begin considering it as much as we do more traditional forms of technology.