Jay Keasling looks at global warming and energy the way a farmer looks at global hunger. He sees the answers right under our feet.

Keasling directs the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and he is a leading expert in an emerging field -- synthetic biology -- that rewrites genetic codes from scratch. Recently, using a $43 million Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant, he engineered a unique form of bacteria that produces a precursor to the antimalarial drug, artemisinin. The breakthroughcould lead to cheaper malaria drugs for the developing world.

Now Keasling is setting his sights on creating renewable energy. With a $16 million grant from the National Science Foundation, he heads a consortium of scientists from Berkeley, MIT, UCSF, and Harvard attempting to lay down the building blocks for synthetic biology. As he explains his latest pursuit in his new, off-campus office at the foot of Ashby Avenue, Keasling leans forward in his chair, eyes wide, thrusting his chin and grinning with self-confidence. He says synthetic biology could change medicine, agriculture, and the world's energy.

"If you've got enough people and they're organized in the right way, not only can we do some great science and great education, but we can really solve this problem," he says. Synthetic biology, or synthetic genomics as it is sometimes called, is the next step in genetics. Unlike genetic engineering, which takes large pieces of DNA and mixes them with other pieces, synthetic biology reengineers new organisms the way one might play with Legos. As with his antimalarial bacteria, Keasling hopes a microbe can be developed that efficiently turns plant fiber into ethanol for fuel, changing America's farm fields into energy plants. But Keasling laughs at this and says: Why stop there?

"We have so many tools in biology, let's not settle on something like ethanol. We can do better," he says. "Maybe I want to produce octane, what we put in our gas tanks right now. Why not?"

While octane would not necessarily be a cleaner option, Keasling's confidence in synthetic biology appears unbridled. With a blank slate for what an artificial genome might produce, he says science is nearing the point when it will make just about anything by reprogramming microbes.

Keasling, who did his postdoctoral work at Stanford but still goes home often to his parents' farm in Nebraska, points to a tall potted plant in his office and says nature already stores plenty of energy for transportation.

"You have plants that produce either cornstarch or cellulose. And then you take that cellulose and you have microbes degrade it and turn it into your fuel in a tank. This is essentially the way we make ethanol now," he said. "You could do the same thing, but let's swap out the ethanol pathway."

Butanol, for example, is a much better replacement for traditional gasoline than ethanol. It's easier to ship, has more energy, and is less corrosive. The problem is that no one knows if it can be harvested efficiently from plants. But by redesigning the fermenting microbes, Keasling says, scientists can streamline the process. And with synthetic biology, they might go so far as to redesign a crop other than corn.

"Corn isn't a great feedstock. Something like miscanthus would be a much better feedstock," Keasling says. Miscanthus giganteus, or giant Chinese silver grass, is a 10- to 15-foot tall grass currently used as a decorative plant and as burning fuel in farm heating plants. A resilient plant, it requires very little fertilizer, creates 10 tons of biomass per acre, and easily could be planted throughout America's heartland. With a few changes, Keasling says about 100 million acres of miscanthus -- about a quarter of the current cropland in use -- could meet the entire U.S. transportation fuel demand.

But Keasling admits that a working, grass-based, designer-microbe fuel may be a long way off. With his new NSF grant he and his partners will start an engineering research center called SynBERC (Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center). The new center will not address energy directly but will focus on the basic "rulebook" of how to assemble working genes.

Keasling compares his work to designing a computer. Before the modern computer could exist, someone had to design components such as the motherboard, sound card, and hard drive. Once it is built, other researchers could improve on the design and incorporate them with new components. In a biological system, it's a little tougher because everything in the cell tends to affect everything else and there are no standardized parts such as computer disks or video cards. So to start, Keasling and the Berkeley Lab team are trying to catalog genetic units within the cell.

"What synthetic biology is trying to do is to first decide how we should standardize the connections to build parts that can be assembled that will work the same every time in everybody's hands," he says.

To do that, the scientific community will have to work together. Using computers as an example again, Keasling wants to make synthetic biology discoveries "open source," where only the very leading edge of research is patented and the rest is available to anyone. He believes the over-patenting and secrecy of synthetic biology's older cousin, genetic engineering, has hampered collaboration and progress.

With his Midwestern pragmatism, Keasling says solutions such as butanol will work only in conjunction with existing technologies, but up until now, America has wasted opportunities to curb the energy crisis.

"Think if we were the largest producer of windmills in the world, if we were the largest producer of photovoltaics. Think what that would do for the U.S. economy and for jobs in the U.S.," he says. "People wouldn't have to give up their SUVs. They could drive the biggest damn vehicles they want and put renewable fuels in them."

Erik Vance is a graduate of the science writing program at UC Santa Cruz and a fellow at California magazine.