This month in Discover Magazine there is an article celebrating their Scientist of the Year and two nominees. The Scientist of the Year is Jay Keasling, and he is what has become known as a synthetic biologist. His immediate work is shooting for a low-cost, mass manufacturing method for producing an effective drug against malaria called artemisinin. His lab is working on reengineered yeast to produce the drug. The interesting thing that is mentioned very briefly in the article is that in the future he thinks that it won’t be too large a step to modify the process to create biofuels. You put sugar and bacteria or yeast into one end of a big vat, and you get fuel out the other end. This is a very distant technology, but it’s very exciting.

Read the articles: Scientist of the year and the two runners-up.