Nope,
It will not take 25 years. Craig Venter is being backed by the DOE. In 2004 CV toured the world giving lectures on the roadmap for his company
Synthetic Genomics which he founded when he got fed up with Celera. When he quit Celera (a few months after the 2001
Nature publication of the Human Genome Map) he toured the worlds seas taking samples of marine micro-organisms with the intention to sequence and patent genes of enzymes in key metabolic pathways (nitrogen fixation, hydrogen synthesis, photosynthesis). He collected samples of thousands of micro-organisms (and he almost created an international episode when the French navy almost gunned him out of the French Polynesia waters) which were to be fed to the sequencers which had been sitting iddle since 2001 (the moment we finished HGP). The technical tools he is employing are probably mind blowing. From publications in Science, Nature and PNAS it can be gathered that they have achieved an order to two orders of magnitude improvement in the rate of solid phase DNA synthesis compared to the slow molecular cloning approach.
The theoretical tools come from computational system's biology and in fact have been the target of
multiple calls for proposal from both the NSF (USA) and the FP6 (EU).
For the computationally literate here, his approach aims to do for genomic biology what Component Based approaches did to Software Engineering.
It will not take 25 years .... from what I have seen in the bioinformatics literature and from what I heard during one of the lectures he gave last year ... I'd bet they are looking for real estate now to place the photobioreactors and are trying to pre-emptively deal with the ethical issues that arise from making new life forms.
Energy will come from the sun .... directly captured by the micro-organisms with a longer term goal involving ecologies of micro-organisms in advanced bio-reactors. The latter will likely have to wait more than 10 years but not the former ....
I'm glad that Graeme put this at PO.com ... at least the 4-5 people here who have been exchanging PMs about this, can now come out of the closet
"Nuclear power has long been to the Left what embryonic-stem-cell research is to the Right--irredeemably wrong and a signifier of moral weakness."Esquire Magazine,12/05
The genetic code is commaless and so are my posts.