Scientia

One sunny afternoon in the early 1970's, during the OPEC-induced oil shock when gasoline prices sky-rocketed and real shortages caused long lines at the pump, University of California, San Diego biology professor Gordon Sato unveiled to me, a graduate student at the time, a grand vision of oil produced by photosynthetic algae as they lived out their microbial lives in shallow artificial lakes in the deserts of southern California and Arizona.