Biotech Industry Cooks up PR Plans to Get us to Swallow Synthetic Biology Food
        
            By Dana Perls, 
                Food and Technology Blog
             | 05. 22. 2014
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
             
    Two   Mondays ago, I sat in a room of some of the most powerful agribusiness,   food and synthetic biology companies in the world. The goal of this   industry meeting was to discuss how to get the public to accept synthetic biology,   a new and unregulated set of genetic engineering methods, as the   “foundation for the future of sustainable food.” It was meant to be a   closed door and off-the-record industry meeting, in contrast to the open public forum on   synthetic biology in our food which I helped organize the week before.   But after some of the companies caught wind that Friends of the Earth   was going to expose the leaked meeting information, we were cordially   urged to attend by the meeting organizers. 
 
    Although there is no   agreed upon definition of synthetic biology, it is a term that   encompasses a variety of new, and many would say, “extreme” genetic   engineering approaches, including computer generated DNA, directed   evolution, and site specific mutagenesis. It’s faster and uses more   powerful methods to engineer new genetic sequences than “traditional”   genetic engineering. Engineers can even...
 
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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            Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
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