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raig Venter is a singular individual who aspires to be universal. In Life at the Speed of Light, he fantasizes this: “since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth, as they rip-ple out into space. Borne upon those waves, my life now moves at the speed of light. ” He wonders whether an alien civilization might understand and act upon his genome’s broad-cast “instructions.” No doubt, the Earthbound Venter already wears many hats: scientist (racing the National Institutes of Health to sequence the human genome), sailor (captaining Sorcerer II to sequence the Sargasso Sea), and bio-tycoon (aggressively commercializing his research). Whereas Venter’s previous book ( 1) traced his career and personal life, he now offers a 21st-century response to the question physicist Erwin Schrödinger posed at Trin-ity College, Dublin, in 1943: “What Is Life?” Seventy years later, Venter strode across the same stage to tackle the same question. Like his predecessor ( 2), he has produced a book based on his lecture, and he opens by compar-ing his thinking to Schrödinger’s. The book roughly divides into three sections: histori-cal, biographical, and speculative. Venter fi rst looks back to trace the past 60 years of molecular biology, identifying thematic precur-sors to synthetic biology (e.g.