Synthetic life ‘advance’ reported
An important step has been taken in the quest to create a synthetic lifeform.
A US team reports in Science magazine how it built the entire DNA code of a common bacterium in the laboratory using blocks of genetic material.
The group hopes eventually to use engineered genomes to make organisms that can produce clean fuels and take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Publication of the research gives others the chance to scrutinise it. Some have ethical concerns.
It sets the stage for what we hope is going to be a new approach to engineering organisms.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:46 am
This is quite fascinating.
I don’t have any solid opinions on the topic..but suffice to say that there is a whole continuum of the ‘real’, ’synthetic’ and ‘artificial’ living matter. Manipulating genes of bacteria is something entirely different from growing artificial rabbits.
And totally different from cloning animals, say the famous sheep Dolly.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
God. What a life is this.