People Who Mattered
Craig Venter
David Deal for TIMEWhat do you do when you're done sequencing the human genome? If you're Craig Venter, you write a new genome from scratch. This year the maverick geneticist pried even further into the secrets of life by painstakingly assembling 582,970 base pairs into the genome of an entirely new organism, a fully synthetic bacterium named Mycoplasma genitalium. The future could bring micro-organisms custom-designed to produce biofuels.
—Lev Grossman
See the Six Degrees of Barack Obama.
People Who Mattered: Full List
Connect to this TIME Story
Year in Review 2008
/time/includes/poy2008/poy_peoplematter.xml
Most Popular »
- Are You Getting Scammed by Facebook Games?
- Stresses at Fort Hood Were Likely Intense for Hasan
- Priests Spar Over What it Means to Be Catholic
- The State of Hillary: A Mixed Record on the Job
- China Woos Africa — And Not Just For Its Resources
- Military Fears Gains with Muslim Soldiers May Be Lost
- The Meaning of Manny Pacquiao
- Brazil Student Expelled for Mini-Dress
- Hasan's Therapy: Could "Secondary Trauma" Have Driven Him to Shooting?
- Why We Look at Some Web Ads and Not Others
- Are You Getting Scammed by Facebook Games?
- Why We Look at Some Web Ads and Not Others
- Priests Spar Over What it Means to Be Catholic
- China Woos Africa — And Not Just For Its Resources
- Why France Is Pushing Its Students to Master English
- Let's Bail Out the Pot Dealers!
- I Can Has Swine Flu? A Cat Comes Down with H1N1
- The Meaning of Manny Pacquiao
- Berets and Baguettes? France Rethinks Its Identity
- In Fight Against AIDS, Kenya Confronts Gay Taboo
Person of the Year 2008
RSS