at Berkeley,is on a quest to develop an organism that can artificially produce artemisinin.This substance is a natural extract of the sweet wormwood tree and is used to cure people infected with a strain of malaria resistant to the common antimalarial drug quinine.Today, artemisinin cannot be produced in sufficient quantities.Keasling aims to change that.He began the development of synthetic artemisinin with common baker's yeast,which metabolizes sugar.He inserted a complex structure of biodevice-implanted genes into the yeast cells. The new cellular instructions divert a part of the yeast's natural metabolism into a biochemical process that synthesizes artemisinin. Keasling believes he can overcome the remaining hurdles and produce the malaria drug soon.If successful,Keasling believes that relatively small amounts of yeast and sugar placed in a fermentation tank could produce enough self-replicating synthetic artemisinin to treat all the malaria patients in the world.