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The Alien Genome

Oct 19, 2012

Forget sending humans to Mars, Craig Venter and Jonathan Rothberg want to send sequencers to the red planet, according to Technology Review.

Venter, speaking at the Wired Health Conference in New York, said that his company Synthetic Genomics and the J. Craig Venter Institute plan to "develop a machine capable of sequencing and beaming back DNA data from Mars," Tech Review reports.

Additionally, Ion Torrent founder Jonathan Rothberg tells Tech Review that he wanted to send a PGM machine to Mars as part of a NASA-funded project dubbed SETG, or search for extra-terrestrial genomes.

According to the project's website: "The sensitive technologies used to study the extremes of life on Earth can be applied to the search for life on other planets."

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