Aggregated News
Right about now, it would be great if we could release into the Gulf of Mexico a vat of bugs that did nothing but eat gobs of oil and digest it into harmless smaller bits. Meanwhile, we'd power the cleanup vessels with microbes that swallow grass clippings or seaweed and spit out fuel, so we'd no longer need to punch holes in the bottom of the Gulf in the first place.
Such is the promise of synthetic biology, which, according to the people who have tried to explain it to me, is basically a marketing term for all kinds of research in which scientists tinker with biological bits to make useful things - sort of like living Lego blocks. The latest breakthrough in the field came a few weeks ago, with news that left headline writers torn between Genesis and Frankenstein: the biopioneer Craig Venter was said to have become the first to create life in the lab. What Venter did was replace the natural genome in a cell with a slightly modified synthetic one, which then issued the orders...
Such is the promise of synthetic biology, which, according to the people who have tried to explain it to me, is basically a marketing term for all kinds of research in which scientists tinker with biological bits to make useful things - sort of like living Lego blocks. The latest breakthrough in the field came a few weeks ago, with news that left headline writers torn between Genesis and Frankenstein: the biopioneer Craig Venter was said to have become the first to create life in the lab. What Venter did was replace the natural genome in a cell with a slightly modified synthetic one, which then issued the orders...