Money and Finance
Factory of Life
Synthetic biology was born a little more than a decade ago, an offshoot of traditional genetic engineering but distinct in its ambitions, precision and mind-set. Instead of randomly tweaking the genetic blueprints of living organisms and then working backward to identify a cell with a desirable trait, the new field offered the power of designing and building cells with novel functions. Its pioneers dreamed of making armies of organisms that could produce alternative fuels, churn out drugs to battle disease or fill every stomach on the planet by squeezing more food out of each crop acre.
Now, synthetic biologists have laid the groundwork for that radical new future, by building biology’s version of Silicon Valley. One research team has created a new and more complex set of biological building blocks that snap together like Legos, bringing large-scale production of engineered organisms closer to reality. Other scientists have hooked those parts up in a complex living analog of an electrical circuit and programmed it, much like programming a computer. Researchers are now writing code to make cells do things never before thought possible, like hunt down and kill cancer cells.
“This is not just — oh, we’re going to go build something that’s able to make pieces of DNA better,” says Knight, one of the field’s top visionaries. “This is — we’re going to go create a technology infrastructure in the same way that the semiconductor infrastructure was developed.”
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Genome Brings Ancient Girl To Life
Things like this get me excited for all the young people of the world who are interested in science and choose some field related to genomics for their career paths. In a stunning technical feat, an international team of scientists has sequenced the genome...
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"we Are All Atomic Beings..."
From the book Cracking the Code: “We are all atomic beings, made up of molecules and cells. The processes by which our cells operate and interact make us who we are. Once we understand that we are biochemical beings, albeit incredibly complex ones,...
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Cost Of Gene Sequencing Falls, Raising Hopes For Medical Advances
Remember the Steve Jobs comment: “I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology.” MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In Silicon Valley, the line between computing and biology has begun to blur...
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Publication Of The Gorilla Genome Opens Window Onto Human Evolution
Found via the RDFRS. The sequence of the gorilla genome is published today, completing the set for the living great apes. The findings provide a unique perspective on our own origins and are an important resource for research into human evolution and...
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter From The Facebook Filing
As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want...
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