I just watched Cracking the Ocean Code on the Discovery Science Channel last night. It’s on again at 3pm Eastern Time today and tomorrow. Really amazing. Venter basically circumnavigated the globe stopping every 200 miles to sample the microscopic life in the ocean which he is now shotgun sequencing back at his lab. In the shakedown cruise to the Sargasso Sea hundreds of new species and over a million unique new genes were discovered upon analysis. We’ve only catalogued about 1% of all species on the planet and have sequenced just a tiny fraction of those catalogued. As sequencing methods improve and prices plummet saying this is just the tip of the iceberg is a vast understatement.