Craig Venter: I spend my time looking forward
via youtube.com
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Obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough. Hi there, I’m Abhishek
Tiwari, and I write Fisheye
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Synthetic Biology
See all posts on posterous with this tag »Chirality of Bacillus mycoides colonies
Bundles of filaments made by cells connected at the poles curve clockwise or counterclockwise in different strains. Curvature is genetically determined. The image shows a 9 cm wide colony of a strain curving clockwise, grown for 8 days in TS agar at 24°C.
Synthetic biology: A new oxymoron
An oxymoron is a phrase that combines two contradictory words, such as "jumbo shrimp" and "deafening silence." Appropriately, the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron, from the Greek oxymõros, which means "pointedly foolish," but the roots of the word are oxys, "sharp," and mõros, "dull."
A relatively new oxymoron is synthetic biology, coined by the geneticist Waclaw Szybalski in 1974. Synthetic biology (also called synbio) uses engineering methods to produce something new by treating a living system not so much as a biological entity but as a kind of technology. Hence synthetic biology is also called biological engineering or just bioengineering.
If a synthetic biologist focuses on genetic modifications using custom-built genes instead of naturally occurring ones, then he or she is practicing synthetic genomics. A biological system augmented with nonnatural components is a semiotic system.
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But the real challenge will start when we enter the synthetic biology phase of research....This would be a field with…hardly any limitations to building..."synthetic" organisms, like a "new better mouse."
—Waclaw Szybalski, "In Vivo and In Vitro Initiation of Transcription," 1974
Where will synthetic biology lead us?
If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.
via newyorker.com
The god of small things
After unlocking the secrets of the human genome, the controversial scientist Craig Venter now is trying to engineer a microbe to liberate us from our dependence on oil.
via smh.com.au
