Rethinking Mother Nature's Choices.

The article highlights Jay Keasling, a chemical engineer at the University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Keasling believes ethanol is a poor biofuel and favors the use of gasoline instead. He contends that alternative fuels, like ethanol, have a hard act to follow. Ethanol is a short-chain alcohol, featuring a less energetic carbon-oxygen bond alongside some of the power-packing carbon-hydrogen bonds of gasoline. It delivers about 30 percent less energy than gasoline. With his contention about ethanol, he is anticipating that synthetic biology will allow him to make microbes that turn out transportation fuel.