Aaron Grech December 23rd, 2019 - 10:04 PM

Performer Moses Sumney has debuted a raw new song and accompanying music video titled Polly, the closing track from the first part of his upcoming albumgr, which will be released in two parts viaJagjaguwar Records. The first partwill be released digitally in February of 2020, while part two, along with the physical album in its entirety, are set to be released on May 15th.

Polly, features a still shot of Sumney in front of the camera, as he begins to bare his emotions, breakdown and cry as the songs lyrics are shown. The song features a simple instrumental with only an acoustic guitar, and Sumneys somber voice carrying the emotional track.

Pollys about wishing you had a few more arms than you do, Sumney stated in a press release regarding the recent song. As opposed to the experimental and grandiose instrumentation on his previous single Virile, this new track is heavily stripped down. Regarding Virile, Sumney explained:In a post-human world, the last remaining man is caught between beauty and brutalitys battle to dominate the earth and his body.

gr follows Sumneys acclaimed debut albumAromanticismand his subsequent EPBlack In Deep Red, 2014,the latter of which was released last year. The performer was also featured on James Blakes latest album releaseAssume Form, which also held features from Andree 3000 and Travis Scott. This latest album project was recorded in Sumneys newest home inAsheville, North Carolina, following his previous stint in Los Angeles, California.

Photo Credit: Sharon Alagna

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Moses Sumney Cries In Front Of The Camera In New Music Video for Polly - mxdwn.com

Vision Art Platform, a newly established art platform in Istanbul's Maslak neighborhood, is currently hosting "After Nature," a group exhibition by Gkhan Balkan and Berkay Budan.

Speaking to Daily Sabah, the platform's founder Hayrunnisa Tayar elaborated on the gallery and its recent show. Tayar said she decided to deal with arts as a job when she realized art's relationship with reality and life. She thinks that art isn't something discovered in later periods, instead, it is what life brings with itself to us.

Tayar's platform aims to bring together audiences of all generations and different roots under the roof of art through workshops, artist talks, performances and experience-based activities open to interaction along with exhibits. "Combining the dynamism of modern urban life with street art, pop art, interdisciplinary experiences and the creative face of contemporary art and also establishing an understandable and accessible bridge to art is the essence of the difference that the Vision Art Platform creates," she said.

"After Nature" is the premiere of Vision Art Platform's art and event program, which aims to connect and interact with the viewers who are into art as well as with those who have no close contact with art in their daily lives. In the exhibition, Gkhan Balkan rejects the principle of a human-centered universe in the development potential of techno-evolution, which he calls "the third nature" and opens the door to new kinds of existences. While Berkay Budan treats the aftermath of nature as a process of decay, of submission to chaos, that is - entropy. The artworks that emerge as a result of these approaches produce an uncanny duet about the state of unity of contrast and uncertainty.

With the works of Balkan and Budan, Tayar noted that they observed both similarities and differences in the two artists' productions, which were highly impressive, and decided to open a show with them. Curated by Rafet Arslan, the exhibit will run until Jan. 20, 2020.

No victory after nature

The story of human civilization's intervention and transformation of nature is a reflection of its process of becoming the subjects of the planet. As human beings produced tools and attempted to build cities, their struggle and relationship with nature produced uncertainty and chaos that transcended their imagination through technological and industrial revolutions.

As humanity moved from Immanuel Kant's evaluation of "the second nature" created by human power to the discussions of the "Anthropocene" age, the ecological and sociological dimensions of human's effect on nature, which touched on daily life, has also been brought into question. The human species' destruction of the planetary ecosystem, the declining natural resources, growing social unrest and the wars that they triggered started to be discussed.

Today, we have reached the final stages of human civilization's struggle against nature while fulfilling its own goals and ambitions. We should also realize that there is no victorious future for man on the horizon in the world after nature.

Artist Gkhan Balkan takes the concept of second nature produced by man one step further and creates his own image through a wide delta of thoughts covering post-human futures such as artificial intelligence (AI), nanotechnology and robot evolution while painting the loss of nature and reality through the nature fiction of the architectural and the artificial. In the exhibition "After Nature," the artist reveals a competent image in which he seeks the plastic language and forms of the future.

Berkay Budan, on the other hand, presents pure and untouched natural landscapes, which occupy an important part of the art of painting, with his new productions on metal plates over the uncertain and destruction-prone image of the age in which he lives. While the artist builds romantic extensions on the apocalyptic image of industrial society suggesting the absence of nature in the landscapes he reveals, he continues his unique image on the landscape through the figure in his sculptural works.

Similar concerns have been observed in the works of both artists with their innovative pursuits in material selection and experimentality in their aesthetic applications. However, both artists' perspectives on the post-natural world have developed with very different dynamics. Speaking to Daily Sabah, curator of the exhibition, Aslan said: "To put the two artists who produce different concerns into a duet, to look after what is visible; creating harmony with appearances that looks like oppositely was the main challenge of this exhibition."

"The exhibition is a new suggestion about our fictions on what is known and seen and a puzzle about our perception of general perceptions. In this sense, putting the works by the two artists in different times and series together in a new context is, above all, creating a space for new questions," he said.

Continued here:

'After Nature': a show discovering the post natural world - Daily Sabah

As the new year approaches, food is front and centerits stocked in our homes for gatherings with friends, offered at office holiday parties and constantly on our minds as we plan menus for family dinners or brainstorm next years healthy eating plan. Its a seasonable time to consider what happens to your food before it hits your plate. And for many consumers, thats something of a puzzle, particularly when it comes to understanding organic versus GMOsor genetically modified organisms.

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Asking questions like Is organic non-GMO? and How do GMOs compare to organic food? can help you make better sense of what youre feeding yourself and your loved ones. Heres a helpful guide to boost your knowledge and inform your nutritional choices all year round.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines GMOs as organisms whose genetic materialor DNAhas been altered or modified in some way that does not occur naturally. In most cases, genetic engineering works by transferring individual genes from one organism to another. Most commonly found in crops such as soybeans, corn and canola, GMOs are designed to provide a higher nutritional value to food, as well as protect crops against pests.

Organic foods, on the other hand, do not contain any pesticides, fertilizers, solvents or additives. According to the Organic Trade Association (OTA), USDA-certified organic foods are grown and processed according to strict federal guidelines that cover everything from soil quality and pest control to animal raising practices. Similarly, organic livestock raised for meat, eggs and dairy products must be given organic feed, and cannot receive antibiotics, growth hormones or any animal by-products.

Is organic non-GMO?

Theres plenty of debate surrounding GMO and organic food, which can make grocery shopping around the holiday season a harrowing experience. Making a key distinction can go a long way.

For those looking to avoid the use of chemical pesticides, along with the high costs of organic food, non-GMO products are a viable alternative. Thats because non-GMO products dont contain any GMO ingredients. However, that doesnt mean they are grown organically.

Organic isand always has beennon-GMO, says Laura Batcha, CEO and executive director of the OTA. But non-GMO is not always organic.

Understanding the pros and cons of both options can also empower consumers. Heres how industry experts weigh in:

Why GMO?

Why organic?

A critical eye

So what are the shortcomings of GMOs and organic items? Common arguments against GMOs include the consumption of harmful bacteria and toxins, increased risk of allergic reaction and outcrossing, or the mixing of crops from conventional seeds with GM crops, which may have an indirect effect on food safety and food security, reports WHO.

Opponents of organic food argue that its significantly more expensive than GMO or non-GMO foods, has a shorter shelf life compared to GMO foods and may have higher bacteria levels due to limited pesticide and herbicide usage.

How to make the right choice for you and your family

Both categories of foodnon-GMO and organicare subject to strict regulatory guidelines and have gone through rigorous verification programs. That alone may provide consumers with the peace of mind theyre looking for when holiday grocery shopping.

If organic is the way you want to go, Batcha offers these tips to get the best bang for your buck:

Shop smart: Look for specials on organic products, and buy in bulk whenever you can to cut costs.

Prioritize: Think about what your family eats a lot of, and what your healthy eating priorities are.

Comparison shop: Organic fresh produce is sometimes sold at the same price as conventional, so check out organic produce aisles.

Pick and choose carefully: While conventional milk can be cheaper, recent research published by Cambridge University Press suggests that organic milk is free of pesticide and antibiotic residues. If your family drinks milk, its worth the extra cost to buy organic.

A little common sense goes a long way, too. Cookies, cakes and other sugar-laden treats, even if organic, are still not the healthiest option. And if you really want to know what youre eating, try cooking from scratcheven if it means incorporating some DIY cooking hacks. Understanding the differences between organic vs. GMO foods will allow you to provide your loved ones with the right nutritional options.

Read the rest here:

Whats The Real Difference Between Organic And GMO? - Forbes

The concept of using bispecific antibodies for tumor therapy has been developed more than 30 years ago with many initial struggles. However, new developments such as sophisticated molecular design and genetic engineering have helped tremendously in solving many technical challenges and created the next generation bispecific antibodies with high efficacy and safety profiles.

With many successes recently, the zoo of bispecific antibodies now consists of more than 100 different formats, and about 80 bispecific antibodies are currently in clinical trials.

KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: Current Landscape and Outlook of Bispecific Antibody

Roland Kontermann, PhD, Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Institute of Cell Biology and Immunology, University of Stuttgart

Bispecific antibodies have experienced a dramatic interest and growth for therapeutic applications, with more than 80 molecules in clinical development; e.g., in oncology, immuno-oncology, but also for non-oncology applications. An overview will be given on the making of bispecific antibodies and the various therapeutic concepts and applications, e.g., for dual targeting strategies, retargeting of immune effector cells, and substitution therapy by mimicking the function of natural proteins.

Functional Screening Unlocks the Therapeutic Potential of Bispecific Antibodies

Mark Throsby, PhD, CSO, Merus NV

Case studies of clinical assets will be discussed that highlight the role of empirical functional screening. Examples will include both I-O and targeted therapies demonstrating that diverse functional readouts can be incorporated into bispecific antibodies screens.

Selection-Based Development of a Heavy Chain-Light Chain Pairing Technology

Paul Widboom, PhD, Associate Director, Antibody Discovery, Adimab LLC

A significant challenge in the development of multivalent bispecific antibodies involves solving the heavy chain-light chain pairing problem. While most heavy chain-light chain pairs possess a preference for their cognate partner, noncognate mispairing occurs. Avoiding these undesired mispairs is a relevant challenge in the field of bispecific antibody manufacturing. Here we present a solution to the heavy chain-light chain problem derived from a novel selection system. This system finds mutations that improve cognate heavy chain-light chain pairing while maintaining antigen binding affinity.

A Novel Class of Fully Human Co-Stimulatory Bispecific Antibodies for Cancer Immunotherapy

Dimitris Skokos, PhD, Director, Immunity & Inflammation, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

T-cell activation is initiated upon binding of the T-cell receptor (TCR)/CD3 complex to peptide-MHC complexes (signal 1); activation is then enhanced by engagement of a second co-stimulatory receptor, such as the CD28 receptor on T cells binding to its cognate ligand(s) on the target cell (signal 2). Recently described CD3-based bispecific antibodies act by replacing conventional signal 1, linking T cells to tumor cells by binding a tumor-specific antigen (TSA) with one arm of the bispecific, and bridging to TCR/CD3 with the other.

Next-Generation Bispecifics for Cancer Immunotherapy

Michelle Morrow, PhD, Vice President, Preclinical Translational Pharmacology, F-star

The use of bispecific antibodies can potentially modulate anti-tumour immune responses. Bispecific antibodies: an attractive alternative to cancer treatment combinations. F-stars approach to create bispecific mAb. In vitro and in vivo efficacy of F-star bispecific antibodies targeting oncology pathways observed in preclinical studies.

Bispecific Gamma Delta T Cell Engagers for Cancer Immunotherapy

Hans van der Vliet, MD, PhD, CSO, LAVA Therapeutics; Medical Oncologist, Amsterdam UMC

V9V2 T cells constitute the largest T cell subset in human peripheral blood and are powerful anti-tumor immune effector cells that can be identified in many different tumor types. This presentation will discuss bispecific antibodies designed to engage V9V2 T cells and their use for cancer immunotherapy.

Combinatorial Approaches to Enhance Bispecific Anti-Tumor Efficacy

Eric Smith, PhD, Senior Director, Bispecific Antibodies, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

This presentation will describe Regenerons bispecific platform and present preclinical data on REGN4018, a clinical stage T cell engaging bispecific targeting Muc16 for solid tumor indications. In addition, status updates on Regenerons other clinical stage bispecific antibodies (REGN1979, REGN5458, REGN5678) will be presented as well as a discussion of new combinatorial approaches being taken to enhance bispecific anti-tumor efficacy.

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Advances in Bispecific Antibody Development are Leading to an Evolution in Anti-cancer Drugs - OncoZine

There is a consensus that some things can never be replaced like the feel of a book in your hand, or the flavor and texture of chicken nuggets. Rebellyous Foods is here to challenge the latter.

The meat industry market value is expected to rise to 1.5 trillion dollars by 2022, raising the issue of sustainability.

Many people are unaware, but this rising demand also has adverse environmental implications. It isnt hard to imagine that increased meat demand should be accountable for fossil fuel usage, animal methane, water, and land consumption.

RELATED: IMPOSSIBLE FOODS' MEATLESS PATTY COMING TO A GROCERY STORE NEAR YOU

But did you know that meat consumption is one of the leading causes of the 6th mass extinction that is currentlyhappening?

There are many layers to the problem of replacing the traditional meat industry.

You have to get the taste right. You have to get the price right. You have to change eating patterns actively.

All the while keeping the environmental impact in check.

To do so, we need expertise in everything from machine engineering, chemistry to culinary arts. And thats where Rebellyous Foods comes in.

Rebellyous is the brainchild of Christie Lagally.

An engineer by training, she has leveraged her diverse perspective to tackle the problems of the meat industry. She is one of the key figures in the food movement gripping the nation.

Her ambition is to have all meat-eaters, and not just vegetarians to switch over to this meat alternative. Let us dive into this discussion about her journey towards a meat-free world.

Q: Rebellyous is an interesting name. Whats the inspiration/story behind it?

Were rebelling against the meat-industry standard by making a traditional product in a wholly non-traditional way. Were doing this in orderto address the negative impact of poultry production on the environment, industry workers, consumers, and of course,the birds themselves.

At the same time, as a food company, our priority is to give customers delicious, satisfying comfort food. The blend of those two elementsour critically serious mission and the simple desire to give people good food (the belly in the equation)is how our name was born.

Q: After graduating as a mechanical engineer, what made you enter the food-manufacturing industry?

I spent several years working as a project manager at Boeing and prior to that in other disciplines in the aerospace industry, and during that time, I maintained a keen interest in climate action and animal welfare. As such, I was inevitably interested in food system reform, and particularly with regards to the problems posed by meat production and overconsumption.

I saw that new plant-based products were being introduced to replace carbon-intensive, heavily polluting animal products, and yet, none of them were being produced at a scale that would come close to rivaling the scale of the meat industry. At the time, I was working at the largest manufacturing facility in the world, and it made me wonder how much more of an impact plant-based meat could have if its manufacturing technology were optimized.

With Rebellyous Foods, Im working to answer that question.

Q: What makes you think thatmechanical engineering is as -if not more- important than genetic engineering when it comes to deciding the future of the food industry?

Put in the simplest terms, the scale of the meat industry is the result of the development of manufacturing technology. The factory farm model came into existence in the 1960s, and since then, the industry has been on a constant track toward greater efficiency, volume, and production optimization.

Today, we have almost completely automated, mechanized, and robotized slaughter and carcass deconstruction of animal processing. On the other side of the spectrum, theres plant-based meat.

Plant-based alternatives were first introduced to the U.S. commercial market right at the turn of the 20th century, and since then, there have only been isolated and inconsistent attempts to address inefficiencies and scale to meaningful volumes.

Plant-based meat will only truly become widely available when it can be produced and sold at a low cost and high volume. And that will only happen when the industry gets smart about the scale and updates its production technology.

Q: What was the trigger/moment you decided to take the entrepreneurial path? (Was it a difficult change?)

There was no one moment that made me decide to take the entrepreneurial path. But the problem was so compelling to me that I couldnt stop researching it, and when it became clear that no one else was going to address the plant-based meat industrys manufacturing problem, I decided the value was too great not to pursue it.

Q: What better defines you, an entrepreneur or an engineer, and how do you divide your time between the two?

As the CEO of Rebellyous, I spend 90% of my time working to build the company. That being said, I cant build the company without quite literally building the companys equipment solutions and engineering strategy.

Our engineering efforts and growth trajectory are inexplicably linked, so I have to show up with the mindset of both the entrepreneur and the engineer on any given day.

Q: So, you also have a lot of compelling literature online. How would you define your target market? Is it vegans, vegetarians, or does it include meat-eaters as well?

Meat eaters are our target market. For our products to actually address the problems we are working to address (problems like greenhouse gas emissions, chronic disease, and human rights abuses in the poultry industry), they need to be eaten instead of conventionally raised chickens, not in addition to these products. Our goal is to make nuggets for people who love chicken nuggets but dont necessarilylove all of the negative externalities associated with poultry production.

Q: Plant-based protein is healthier and more nutritious than animal protein. Apart from the availability, what are the challenges in their adoption? How do you plan on addressing them?

Price and availability are tremendous barriers to the adoption of plant-based meat in the average persons diet. Even with big recent successes like plant-based meat making its debut in chains like Dunkin, Burger King, and KFC, these options are still two-to-five times more expensive than the regular sausages, burgers, and nuggets.

On top of the issue of cost, we simply dont produce enough plant-based meat for people to eat it on a regular basis. In the United States, we produce more than 105 billion pounds of animal meat each year. Best estimates of U.S. plant-based meat production hovers just around 200 million lbs per year.

Thats a fifth of one percent (0.2%) of the total U.S. meat production by volume.

Put in more relatable terms, that means there is only enough plant-based meat available for each resident of the U.S. to include it in one meal per year. And thats it.

We cant talk about widespread adoption until the product is actually available to adopt!

Q: How much of your products taste is attributed to chemistry and how much to culinary arts?

Food chemistry and culinary arts are practically interchangeable in our R&D efforts. The taste will always be king; chemistry comes in to ensure that we can consistently deliver the same great taste and texture to our customers.

Q: Speaking of chemistry, what do you think of the new protein sources that are emerging in labs around the world?

Cultivated meat (aka lab-grown meat) is a fantastic innovation for consumers who will always want animal-based meat on their plates and may not adopt plant-based proteins because of ideology. Cultivated meat is in its infancy, but we are excited that the industry will soon have products on the market.

Also, many conventionally produced meat products are combined with plant-based proteins, so I anticipate that cultivated meat products will be the same. Someday, we may be producing blended cultivated and plant-based protein products for other companies in our facilities.

RELATED: LAB GROWN MEAT COULD ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR LIVESTOCK

Q: The nuggets have received many favorable reviews. What is next for Rebellyous?

We have a lot in the works right now! In October, we moved into our new headquarters, which was previously being used asa meat processing facility, and we are continuing to build our equipment and hone our systems in this new location.

At the same time, were working with various national brands and food service providers to co-create nuggets that are customized for their customer base. One of the things were most excited about in the near term is introducing a nugget that fits the requirements of the USDAs National School Lunch Program so that we can begin offering this option which has more fiber, less sodium, and less saturated fat than the average chicken nugget to students in K-12 schools.

We couldnt be more excited to give school foodservice directors an affordable, wholesome option to serve to picky eaters.

(Disclaimer: The opinions stated in the interview strictly belong to the interviewee and Interesting Engineering does not necessarily support or endorse them.)

Read this article:

A Sustainable Alternative for Meat Lovers and the Meat Industry - Interesting Engineering

In these waning days of the second decade of the twenty-first century, technologists and investors are beginning to lay the foundations for new, truly transformational technologies that have the potential to reshape entire industries and rewrite the rules of human understanding.

It may sound lofty, but new achievements from businesses and research institutions in areas like machine learning, quantum computing and genetic engineering mean that the futures imagined in science fiction are simply becoming science.

And among the technologies that could potentially have the biggest effect on the way we live, nothing looms larger than genetic engineering.

Investors and entrepreneurs are deploying hundreds of millions of dollars to create the tools that researchers, scientists and industry will use to re-engineer the building blocks of life to perform different functions in agriculture, manufacturing and medicine.

One of these companies, 10X Genomics, which gives users hardware and software to determine the functionality of different genetic code, has already proven how lucrative this early market can be. The company, which had its initial public offering earlier this year, is now worth $6 billion.

Another, the still-private company Inscripta, is helmed by a former 10X Genomics executive. The Boulder, Colo.-based startup is commercializing a machine that can let researchers design and manufacture small quantities of new organisms. If 10X Genomics is giving scientists and businesses a better way to read and understand the genome, then Inscripta is giving those same users a new way to write their own genetic code and make their own organisms.

Its a technology that investors are falling over themselves to finance. The company, which closed on $105 million in financing earlier in the year (through several tranches, which began in late 2018), has just raised another $125 million on the heels of launching its first commercial product. Investors in the round include new and previous investors like Paladin Capital Group, JS Capital Management, Oak HC/FT and Venrock.

Biology has unlimited potential to positively change this world, says Kevin Ness, the chief executive of Inscripta . Its one of the most important new technology forces that will be a major player in the global economy.

Ness sees Inscripta as breaking down one of the biggest barriers to the commercialization of genetic engineering, which is access to the technology.

While genome centers and biology foundries can manufacture massive quantities of new biological material for industrial uses, its too costly and centralized for most researchers. We can put the biofoundry capabilities into a box that can be pushed to a global researcher, says Ness.

Earlier this year, the company announced that it was taking orders for its first bio-manufacturing product; the new capital is designed to pay for expanding its manufacturing capabilities.

That wasnt the only barrier that Inscripta felt that it needed to break down. The company also developed a proprietary biochemistry for gene editing, hoping to avoid having to pay fees to one of the two laboratories that were engaged in a pitched legal battle over who owned the CRISPR technology (the Broad Institute and the University of California both had claims to the technology).

See the rest here:

$125 million for Inscripta may usher in the next wave of genetic engineering - TechCrunch

Our lives have been transformed by the information age. But what's coming next is likely to be more profound, call it the genetic information age. We have mapped the human genome and in just the last few years we have learned to read and write DNA like software. And you're about to see a few breakthroughs-in-waiting that would transform human health. For a preview of this revolution in evolution we met George Church, a world leading geneticist, whose own DNA harbors many eccentricities and a few genes for genius.

We found George Church in here.

Cory Smith: Most of these are frozen George. Little bits of George that we have edited all in different tubes.

Church threw himself into his work, literally. His DNA is in many of the experiments in his lab at Harvard Medical School. The fully assembled George Church is 6'5" and 65. He helped pioneer mapping the human genome and editing DNA. Today, his lab is working to make humans immune to all viruses, eliminate genetic diseases, and reverse the effects of time.

Scott Pelley: One of the things your lab is working on is reversing aging.

George Church: That's right.

Scott Pelley: How is that possible?

George Church: Reversing aging is one of these things that is easy to dismiss to say either we don't need it or is impossible or both.

Scott Pelley: Oh, we need it.

George Church: Okay. We need it. That's good. We can agree on that. Well, aging reversal is something that's been proven about eight different ways in animals where you can get, you know, faster reaction times or, you know, cognitive or repair of damaged tissues.

Scott Pelley: Proven eight different ways. Why isn't this available?

George Church: It is available to mice.

In lucky mice, Church's lab added multiple genes that improved heart and kidney function and levels of blood sugar. Now he's trying it in spaniels.

Scott Pelley: So is this gene editing to achieve age reversal?

George Church: This is adding genes. So, it's not really editing genes. It's, the gene function is going down, and so we're boosting it back up by putting in extra copies of the genes.

Scott Pelley: What's the time horizon on age reversal in humans?

George Church: That's in clinical trials right now in dogs. And so, that veterinary product might be a couple years away and then that takes another ten years to get through the human clinical trials.

Human trials of a personal kind made George Church an unlikely candidate to alter human evolution. Growing up in Florida, Church was dyslexic, with attention deficit, and frequently knocked out by narcolepsy.

Scott Pelley: What was it that made you imagine that you could be a scientist?

George Church: The thing that got me hooked was probably the New York World's Fair in 1964. I thought this is the way we should all be living. When I went back to Florida, I said, "I've been robbed," you know? "Where is it all?" So, I said, "Well, if they're not going to provide it, then I'm gonna provide it for myself."

With work and repetition, he beat his disabilities and developed a genius for crystallography, a daunting technique that renders 3D images of molecules through X-rays and math. But in graduate school at Duke, at the age of 20, his mania for the basic structures of life didn't leave time for the basic structure of life.

Scott Pelley: You were homeless for a time.

George Church: Yeah. Briefly.

Scott Pelley: Six months.

George Church: Six months.

Scott Pelley: And where were you sleeping when you were homeless?

George Church: Well, yeah. I wasn't sleeping that much. I was mostly working. I'm narcoleptic. So, I fall asleep sitting up anyway.

His devotion to crystallography was his undoing at Duke.

George Church: I was extremely excited about the research I was doing. And so, I would put in 100-plus hours a week on research and then pretty much didn't do anything else.

Scott Pelley: Not go to class.

George Church: I wouldn't go to class. Yeah.

Duke kicked him out with this letter wishing him well in a field other than biology. But, it turned out, Harvard needed a crystallographer. George Church has been here nearly 40 years. He employs around 100 scientists, about half-and-half men and women.

Scott Pelley: Who do you hire?

George Church: I hire people that are self-selecting, they see our beacon from a distance away. There are a lot of people that are a little, you know, might be considered a little odd. "Neuroatypicals," some of us are called.

Scott Pelley: "Neuroatypical?"

George Church: Right.

Scott Pelley: Unusual brains?

George Church: Right, yeah.

Parastoo Khoshakhlagh: One thing about George that is very significant is that he sees what you can't even see in yourself.

Parastoo Khoshakhlagh and Alex Ng are among the "neuroatypicals." They're engineering human organ tissue.

Cory Smith: I think he tries to promote no fear of failure. The only fear is not to try at all.

Cory Smith's project sped up DNA editing from altering three genes at a time to 13,000 at a time. Eriona Hysolli went to Siberia with Church to extract DNA from the bones of wooly mammoths. She's editing the genes into elephant DNA to bring the mammoth back from extinction.

Eriona Hysolli: We are laying the foundations, perhaps, of de-extinction projects to come.

Scott Pelley: De-extinction.

Eriona Hysolli: Yes.

Scott Pelley: I'm not sure that's a word in the dictionary yet.

Eriona Hysolli: Well, if it isn't, it should be.

Scott Pelley: You know there are people watching this interview who think that is playing God.

George Church: Well, it's playing engineer. I mean, humans have been playing engineer since the dawn of time.

Scott Pelley: The point is, some people believe that you're mucking about in things that shouldn't be disturbed.

George Church: I completely agree that we need to be very cautious. And the more powerful, or the more rapidly-moving the technology, the more cautious we need to be, the bigger the conversation involving lots of different disciplines, religion, ethics, government, art, and so forth. And to see what it's unintended consequences might be.

Church anticipates consequences with a full time ethicist in the lab and he spends a good deal of time thinking about genetic equity. Believing that genetic technology must be available to all, not just those who can afford it.

We saw one of those technologies in the hands of Alex Ng and Parastoo Khoshakhlagh. They showed us what they call "mini-brains," tiny dots with millions of cells each. They've proven that cells from a patient can be grown into any organ tissue, in a matter of days, so drugs can be tested on that patient's unique genome.

Scott Pelley: You said that you got these cells from George's skin? How does that work?

Alex Ng: We have a way to reprogram essentially, skin cells, back into a stem cell state. And we have technologies where now we can differentiate them into tissue such as brain tissue.

Scott Pelley: So you went from George's skin cells, turned those into stem cells, and turned those into brain cells.

Alex Ng: Exactly. Exactly.

Scott Pelley: Simple as that.

Organs grown from a patient's own cells would eliminate the problem of rejection. Their goal is to prove the concept by growing full sized organs from Church's DNA.

George Church: It's considered more ethical for students to do experiments on their boss than vice versa and it's good to do it on me rather than some stranger because I'm as up to speed as you can be on the on the risks and the benefits. I'm properly consented. And I'm unlikely to change my mind.

Alex Ng: We have a joke in the lab, I mean, at some point, soon probably, we're going to have more of his cells outside of his body than he has himself.

Church's DNA is also used in experiments designed to make humans immune to all viruses.

George Church: We have a strategy by which we can make any cell or any organism resistant to all viruses by changing the genetic code. So if you change that code enough you now get something that is resistant to all viruses including viruses you never characterized before.

Scott Pelley: Because the viruses don't recognize it anymore?

George Church: They expect a certain code provided by the host that they replicate in. the virus would have to change so many parts of its DNA or RNA so that it can't change them all at once. So, it's not only dead. But it can't mutate to a new place where it could survive in a new host.

Yes, he's talking about the cure for the common cold and the end of waiting for organ transplants. It's long been known that pig organs could function in humans. Pig heart valves are routinely transplanted already. But pig viruses have kept surgeons from transplanting whole organs. Church's lab altered pig DNA and knocked out 62 pig viruses.

Scott Pelley: What organs might be transplanted from a pig to a human?

George Church: Heart, lung, kidney, liver, intestines, various parts of the eye, skin. All these things.

Scott Pelley: What's the time horizon on transplanting pig organs into human beings?

George Church: you know, two to five years to get into clinical trials. And then again it could take ten years to get through the clinical trials.

Church is a role model for the next generation. He has co-founded more than 35 startups. Recently, investors put $100 million into the pig organ work. Another Church startup is a dating app that compares DNA and screens out matches that would result in a child with an inherited disease.

George Church: You wouldn't find out who you're not compatible with. You'll just find out who you are compatible with.

Scott Pelley: You're suggesting that if everyone has their genome sequenced and the correct matches are made, that all of these diseases could be eliminated?

George Church: Right. It's 7,000 diseases. It's about 5% of the population. It's about a trillion dollars a year, worldwide.

Church sees one of his own genetic differences as an advantage. Narcolepsy lulls him several times a day. But he wakes, still in the conversation, often, discovering inspiration in his twilight zone.

Scott Pelley: If somebody had sequenced your genome some years ago, you might not have made the grade in some way.

George Church: I mean, that's true. I would hope that society sees the benefit of diversity not just ancestral diversity, but in our abilities. There's no perfect person.

Despite imperfection, Church has co-authored 527 scientific papers and holds more than 50 patents. Proof that great minds do not think alike.

The best science can tell, it was about 4 billion years ago that self-replicating molecules set off the spark of biology. Now, humans hold the tools of evolution, but George Church remains in awe of the original mystery: how chemistry became life.

Scott Pelley: Is the most amazing thing about life, then, that it happened at all?

George Church: It is amazing in our current state of ignorance. We don't even know if it ever happened ever in the rest of the universe. it's awe-inspiring to know that it either happened billions of times, or it never happened. Both of those are mind boggling. It's amazing that you can have such complex structures that make copies of themselves. But it's very hard to do that with machines that we've built. So, we're engineers. But we're rather poor engineers compared to the pseudo engineering that is biological evolution.

Produced by Henry Schuster. Associate producer, Rachael Morehouse. Broadcast associate, Ian Flickinger.

Read the rest here:

Harvard geneticist George Church's goal: to protect humans from viruses, genetic diseases, and aging - 60 Minutes - CBS News

Engineers and scientists are really like most ordinary consumers except in their interest in experiences that deal with great technical achievements, failures and the future technologies that are yet to be. So, rather than a set of catchy products, this list will focus on unique experiences with particular appeal to engineers and scientists.

I. Books

Reading is an experience unlike no other in that it can be done by any literate person at almost any time and in any place. Here is a very short list of science and engineering related books released in 2019:

> Infinite Powers: The Story of Calculus The Language of the Universe, by Steven Strogatz (Atlantic Books)

This is the story of mathematics greatest ever idea: calculus. Without it, there would be no computers, no microwave ovens, no GPS, and no space travel. But before it gave modern man almost infinite powers, calculus was behind centuries of controversy, competition, and even death.

Professor Steven Strogatz charts the development of this seminal achievement from the days of Archimedes to todays breakthroughs in chaos theory and artificial intelligence. Filled with idiosyncratic characters from Pythagoras to Fourier, Infinite Powers is a compelling human drama that reveals the legacy of calculus on nearly every aspect of modern civilization, including science, politics, medicine, philosophy, and much besides.

> Six Impossible Things: The Quanta of Solace and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World, by John Gribbin (Icon Books Ltd.)

Quantum physics is strange. It tells us that a particle can be in two places at once. Indeed, that particle is also a wave, and everything in the quantum world can be described entirely in terms of waves, or entirely in terms of particles, whichever you prefer.

All of this was clear by the end of the 1920s. But to the great distress of many physicists, let alone ordinary mortals, nobody has ever been able to come up with a common sense explanation of what is going on. Physicists have sought quanta of solace in a variety of more or less convincing interpretations. Popular science master John Gribbin takes us on a tour through the big six, from the Copenhagen interpretation via the pilot wave and many worlds approaches.

> Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanityby Jamie Metzl (Sourcebooks)

At the dawn of the genetics revolution, our DNA is becoming as readable, writable, and hackable as our information technology. But as humanity starts retooling our own genetic code, the choices we make today will be the difference between realizing breathtaking advances in human well-being and descending into a dangerous and potentially deadly genetic arms race.

Enter the laboratories where scientists are turning science fiction into reality. Look towards a future where our deepest beliefs, morals, religions, and politics are challenged like never before and the very essence of what it means to be human is at play. When we can engineer our future children, massively extend our lifespans, build life from scratch, and recreate the plant and animal world, should we?

II. Engineering Coding Boot Camps

All engineers need to stay current in their own discipline as well as learn new skills. What better way to accomplish that goal that with an uber-focused bootcamp.

> Flatiron School

Flatiron School offers on-campus (throughout the US) and online programs in software engineering, data science, and UX/UI Design. The schools immersive courses aim to launch students into careers as software engineers, data scientists, and UX/UI designers through a rigorous curriculum and the support of seasoned instructors and personal career coaches. Through labs and projects, this school teaches students to think and build like software engineers and data scientists. The UX/UI Design includes a client project to give students client-facing experience.

> Hack Reactor

This 12-week immersive coding school provides software engineering education, career placement services, and a network of professional peers. The school has campuses in major US cities as well as an online. During the first six weeks at Hack Reactor, students learn the fundamentals of development, full stack JavaScript and are introduced to developer tools and technologies. In the final six weeks, students work on personal and group projects, using the skills they have learned. After 800+ hours of curriculum, students graduate as full-stack software engineers and JavaScript programmers.

> Codesmith

This program offers a full-time, 12-week full stack software engineering bootcamp in Los Angeles and New York City. Codesmith is a selective program focusing largely on computer science and full-stack JavaScript, with an emphasis on technologies like React, Redux, Node, build tools, Dev Ops and machine learning. This program enables Codesmith students (known as Residents) to build open-source projects, with the aim of moving into positions as skilled software engineers. Codesmith Residents gain a deep understanding of advanced JavaScript practices, fundamental computer science concepts (such as algorithms and data structures), and object-oriented and functional programming. The program helps residents develop strong problem-solving abilities and technical communication skills.

III. Engineer-themed video games

Tired of playing Minecraft, Tetris and other teckie games?Add these new challenges to a virtual stocking stuffers.

> Scrap Mechanic

Scrap Mechanic is a multiplayer sandbox game which drops players right into a world where they literally engineer your own adventures! Players choose from the 100+ building parts at their disposal and create anything from crazy transforming vehicles to a house that moves.

> Automachef

Automachef is an indie puzzle game in which players have to build automatic kitchens for a robotic fast food tycoon who believes he's a human. Sounds good, doesn't it?

> Factorio

Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories. Players will mine resources, research technologies, build infrastructures, automate production and fightenemies. Players must use their imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, apply management skills to keep it working, and protect it from the creatures who dont like them.

Image Source: Factorio

IV. Engineer-Themed Escape Rooms

An escape room is a game in which a team of players cooperatively discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to progress and accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time. The goal is often to escape from the site of the game.

While such escape rooms have become popular in recent years, few tend be filled with puzzles that are based on engineering or science. One that fits the latter categories is calledLabEscape, created by University of Illinois physicist. There are 3 separate missions, each dealing with renowned quantum physicist Professor Schrdenberg. Each mission features a unique set of awesome puzzles and challenges, all designed to amaze, delight, and astound!

Another example is the recently opened Mind-Field Escapes. All Clear is an engineering-focused mission that takes place in a bomb shelter. The scenario is as follows: Its been four years and the shelling has stop. Now its time for the surviors to come out. Unfortunately, someone fed several of the instruction manual to the rats, which means no one really remembers how everything works. All Clear has electrical, mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulics puzzles and more. Its fun for any engineer. Other engineering focused future missions will include Mr Harveys Room and Dr. K. L. Koffs lab.

V. Tours for Engineers

Heres a short list of engineering-related adventures to get off the bucket list.

> Arecibo Observatory

Ever wonder about the radio telescope buried deep in the jungles of Puerto Rico, which has served as a backdrop for TV shows and movies like the X-Files and James Bond, among others. Then maybe a trip to Arecibo is in order.

> Manhattan Project National Historical Park B Reactor

The B Reactor National Historic Landmark is the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor and part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Sign up for a tour and learn more about the people, events, science, and engineering that led to the creation of the atomic bombs that helped bring an end to World War II.

> Apollo Mission Control Center

In 2019, NASA finished refurbishing the iconic room where space exploration began. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, the Agency has refurbished the historic mission control center at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where engineers guided astronauts to their one small step.

VI. Movies for the engineer in all of us

Engineers and scientist like a variety of movies and TV shows, especially those that have cool technology or a science fiction theme. Here are three that made the list in 2019.

> Deadly Engineering 2019 edition, Amazon Original

Engineering failures are Icarus-like moments when our overreaching, greed and desire to conquer the impossible can cost not just reputations, but millions of dollars, the environment and lives. Each episode will focus on one disaster, looking at dramatic archive news footage of the disaster occurring and its devastating impact. Check out a few of the recent episode titles: The Chernobyl Conspiracy,NASAs Challenger Disaster, Doom on the Titanic, and Nightmare in Hells Valley.

> Avengers: Endgame

Whether you are a Marvel fan or not, Endgame presents some pretty cool tech from Tony Starks Ironman suit, Antmans quantum adventures to the time-traveling machine.

> The Current War

The Current Waris the latest film to retell the major events of the decade-long battle between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla to bring electricity to America of the late 1800s. This current retelling focuses on the personality differences between these great inventors and entrepreneurs but includes enough technical bits to ensure the films interest for electrical, mechanical and manufacturing engineers. It is well worth the price of admission.

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John Blyler is a Design News senior editor, covering the electronics and advanced manufacturing spaces. With a BS in Engineering Physics and an MS in Electrical Engineering, he has years of hardware-software-network systems experience as an editor and engineer within the advanced manufacturing, IoT and semiconductor industries. John has co-authored books related to system engineering and electronics for IEEE, Wiley, and Elsevier.

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What Does Every Engineer Want for the Holidays? - Medical Device and Diagnostics Industry

Solar radiation management is perhaps the most controversial type of geoengineering. It would create a medium to block the sunlight from reaching the atmosphere, but it would also change our planet forever. Photo credit: author.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In recent years and in the face of unprecedented changes in the climate system, some previously unknown and risky solutions have been proposed to put a halt to the chain of climate disasters, or at least to slow down the speed of their onslaught. These methods, lumped under the heading of geoengineering, aim to reduce the impact of greenhouse gases on global temperatures, and thus on sea-level rise.

Many experts are already worried that public discussion of geoengineering might dissuade policy makers from making harder but more substantial choices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is commonly called the moral hazard problem, and it has become a major argument against even pursuing further research into geoengineering technologies. However, we should be cautious about applying the moral hazard framework to geoengineering, because it may actually elevate it to a standing it shouldnt have and distract us from discussing more fundamental ethical problems associated with it.

What is geoengineering? Geoengineering is any deliberate, large-scale intervention by humans in the climate system. Broadly speaking, there are two different types of geoengineering technologies. The first aims to solve climate change by addressing the carbon emissions problem. This family of technologies is sometimes called carbon dioxide removal or negative emissions technologies, as these methods try to not only remove the concurring emissions but also reduce the stock of carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere in order to turn back the clock and stop global warming.

The second group is solar radiation management technologies. They aim to reflect a fraction of sunlight back to space in order to generate a cooling effect that can offset the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions. One of the most well-known examples of solar geoengineering is to spray tiny particles of sulfate aerosol into the upper atmosphere to scatter the sunlightmimicking the effect of a volcanic eruption.

There are several different methods at different stages of development under each of the two groups. Some have been already commercialized while others are just ideas discussed in academic papers. However, and regardless of their different development outlook, geoengineering techniques impose some serious moral and ethical questions.

Why geoengineering is not a real fix. Proponents of geoengineering often describe it as a rather quick technical fix for climate change compared to lengthy and hard mitigation efforts. In that sense, geoengineering is framed as a form of insurance against the worst outcomes of climate change or the last resort in the fight to keep the global mean temperature below its disastrous threshold. However, these framings come with an underlying assumption about the reliability, scalability, and acceptability of the geoengineering solutions.

First, it assumes that geoengineering is reliable and functioning with a proven track record. In reality, this is not the case. The best we have achieved with most geoengineering technologies so far is a series of uncoordinated, small, laboratory-scale tests with non-conclusive results. Inherent uncertainties in the climate system, coupled with technological barriers, have contributed to the limited functionality of current geoengineering proposals. This is certainly more of an issue for solar radiation management technologies. With no outdoor experiments to date, most of projections are drawn by studying past volcanic eruptions. However, computer models of the climate system show that the impact of a shortterm volcanic eruption would be quite different from a longterm sustained aerosol injection.

Second, even if the technology were ready and proven, it is far from clear that it could be scaled up to the level that is a match for the climate change problem. For example, according to a 2018 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to keep global temperature rise below two degrees centigrade (a promise of the Paris climate agreement), a deep decarbonization is required to reach net zero emissions by around 2050. The report states that all pathways that limit global warming to 1.5C with limited or no overshoot project the use of carbon dioxide removal on the order of 100 to 1000 [gigatons of CO2] over the 21st century. However, such scale of carbon removal is simply unthinkable with todays technologies. For comparison, the entire world population is collectively emitting about 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. The most suitable technologies for ramping up in that scale are bio-energy with carbon capture and storage and direct air carbon capture and storage. Still, both of these technologies are facing major hurdles to implementation, from land and energy use to investment and financing. Geoengineering is very unlikely to replace or downgrade the importance of mitigation efforts because it simply does not match the scale of the problem.

Finally, social and political acceptability remains a major barrier in pursuing geoengineering technologies. The first problem here is the lack of knowledge among the public about what geoengineering really is. Public opinion surveys show a direct link between learning about geoengineering and the public support for research into it. The second problem is that deliberate manipulation of the climate system imposes great ethical questions with implications that will extend beyond our current generation. Finally, there are political challenges as to how to govern the deployment of these technologies on a planetary scale. The threat of unilateral action, particularly when it comes to solar radiation management through aerosol injection, in our current fragmented world seems more real than any time before, bringing a particular urgency to the governance problem. But carbon dioxide removal proposals are no less politically fraught. Mass afforestation and large-scale bio-energy with carbon capture may threaten food security, water resources, and biodiversity.

Can moral hazard apply to geoengineering? There are, in general, two ways of thinking about the moral hazard problem. In neither case does geoengineering fit. First, moral hazard can be applied to cases with imperfect or insufficient information. Imagine a case where you hire a contractor to fix the air conditioning at your house. The contractor may use low-quality materials to get your air conditioning back to work quickly, but it leaves you exposed to higher costs down the road. Since you do not have any expertise in determining what the contractor has actually done, you are at his or her mercy. In other words, an easy fix, combined with imperfect information, may discourage people from choosing the right alternative.

In the climate change realm, this may seem to be the case at least when people are talking about solar radiation management. Spraying aerosols into the atmosphere would only reduce the global mean temperature it would not address the greenhouse gas emission problem as the underlying cause. It seems like an easy fix that will discourage or distract people from choosing the right alternative: more serious emissions reduction efforts.

However, this would only be the case if we had insufficient information about the cause of climate change and were only concerned about global temperature rise. But in reality, we have little doubt about the cause of climate change or about the distinction between alternative options to stop it. We are not by any means being kept in the dark about what the various options entail.

Furthermore, not every climate-driven event is related to temperature, and not every region or country has the same desired temperature target that can be achieved by solar radiation management. Therefore, it is hard to conceive of a situation in which geoengineering would be deployed in such a satisfactory way that would dissuade people from seeking more substantial decarbonization pathways.

The second approach to thinking about moral hazard frames it as the problem of illusive protection. In this case, providing an easy fix makes people take unnecessary risks, thinking that they are immune to the consequences of their actions. A classic example is the invention of the seat belts for carssome say they pose a moral hazard because they have led people to drive more carelessly. Those who worry that geoengineering poses a moral hazard have argued that, in this case, providing geoengineering options will encourage people to consume more fossil fuels and care less about shifting to a green lifestyle. However, this argument assumes that we know, rather perfectly, that solar radiation management will work and will reduce the temperature. In reality, we do not know how large-scale solar geoengineering works because even small-scale experiments have not yet been undertaken. Further, even if it works perfectly, we do not know if it will provide the protection that supposedly will give people the illusion of immunity. The climate system is a highly complex and interconnected collection of thousands of factors, and deploying solar radiation management could be more dangerous than not doing it.

In sum, the moral hazard framework is a good way of thinking about problems where there are two competing solutions, one hard but substantial and the other one easy and rather superficial. The key here is that, for moral hazard to apply, both options must be real and functioning. But geoengineering is not a functioning option, much less an easy one. Those who use the moral hazard framing to argue against geoengineering are unwittingly reinforcing the mistaken notion that it might be some kind of an insurance policy. The more scientists wring their hands about a moral hazard, the more the public may come to see geoengineering as the quick fix that it isnt.

Geoengineering in many ways resembles genetic engineering. Both technologies may hold promise in addressing serious problems that humanity faces today. As genetic engineering would solve only a subset of health issues and would not be a panacea, no serious objection has been raised against it on the basis of moral hazard. No one thinks that it will dissuade societies from investing in other areas of medical science and public health. Similar to genetic engineering, geoengineering is not a final solution, nor an easy fix. It would be best understood as a complement to ongoing decarbonization effortsbut only once the reliability, scalability, and acceptability issues have been resolved. Using the moral hazard framework is a distraction from the more fundamental ethical challenges facing these technologies.

Read more here:

Geoengineering is no climate fix. But calling it a moral hazard could be counterproductive - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

When coal was burned en masse during the Industrial Revolution, people were unaware of the delicate balance of carbon in the atmosphere. When plastics were invented in the 1930s, we could not have anticipated how they would contaminate our oceans.

Here in the 21st century, we have a much better understanding of the natural world. We also have the tools and technology to put people in better balance with the world. Precision technologies, like the synthetic biology solutions developed at the International Genetic Engineering Machine (iGEM) Competition, are helping us solve yesterdays problems while building a sustainable tomorrow.

The iGEM Competition is almost a rite of passage for young scientists in the field of synthetic biology. The competition was founded in 2003 out of an independent study course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Tom Knight, co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, also co-founded the first course. along with iGEM founder Randy Rettberg and synthetic biology leader Drew Endy. Ginkgo co-founders Austin Che, Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton, and Jason Kelly participated in the early years of the course. They entered an iGEM team together in 2006, working on producing a flavor compound in E. coli. Today, many industry leaders in synthetic biology have been forged in the competitive fires of the iGEM crucible.

Since 2003, iGEM has grown into a global event with thousands of participants who come together in Boston for the iGEM Giant Jamboree. This competition showcases the innovations from young synthetic biologists at high-school, undergraduate and overgraduate level which help solve global problems through synthetic biology solutions. Key to this is the use of standard biological parts. These are functional units of DNA, like a gene or a promoter. Parts are added to the iGEM Registry so that teams around the world for years to come can use them to create novel biological solutions. Its global teamwork.

Seeing the impact they can have in enabling the next generation of synthetic biologists, forward-thinking companies are keen to support iGEM teams. Twist Bioscience recognized the immediate benefits they could bring to the participants by partnering their DNA synthesis technology with iGEM. DNA is the foundational element of engineering biology, the biobytes which can program a sustainable bioeconomy. Twist have developed a unique DNA synthesis platform on a silicon chip. When CEO Emily Leproust addressed the 2019 Giant Jamboree, she likened DNA to language.

Twist CEO Emily Leproust addresses the next generation of synthetic biologists at the iGEM Giant Jamboree. Her message: The ability to make DNA should never get in the way of the innovators making biological solutions for the world. Photo: iGEM Foundation and Justin Knight.

Individual letters have very little impact but, when put together in order, they have the power to describe the world around us, bringing knowledge, relationship, and engagement, she explained. Highlighting the entrepreneurial and world-changing spirit of iGEM, she added Twist started with a big idea. We can use silicon technology to write DNA. Each day we are producing millions of oligonucleotides and we turn these oligos into thousands of high-grade genes to be used by researchers.

Pollution was one of the common themes of this years contest, and there were many standout teams at this years iGEM Giant Jamboree working in this area:

Novel ideas developed at iGEM dont disappear at the end of the project, either. To help retain and build on this global talent, the iGEM foundation established After iGEM.

There are about 150 relevant synbio-based iGEM co-founders with roots in the competition. These are applied synthetic biology companies focusing on areas like food, agri tech, water and health, says Will Wright, Director of Entrepreneurship at the iGEM Foundation.

Wright highlights teams that have resulted in startups such as Ginkgo, PvP Biologics, Hyasynth, and Puraffinity, but there are many, many more success stories spinning out of iGEM. After iGEM aims to keep engaging with iGEMers across the world, developing their skills and companies through specialist programs, and helping spread the idea of biological solutions to global problems.

Investing in people is key to achieving this. Engineering biology is not a cheap technology to develop or scale and the field relies on the support of grants and investment that seek to improve our world. Companies like Twist recognize this.

We never want access to DNA to be a limiting factor to your research, Leproust said at this years Giant Jamboree. That is why we are proud to have provided every team with 10,000 bases of free DNA this year and to be supporting iGEM with the synthesis of the Registry of Standardized Parts.

iGEM team members in exchange with competition judges on the main floor or the iGEM Jamboree in Boston, October 2019. Photo: iGEM Foundation and Justin Knight

Fast, inexpensive access to any of the parts in the Registry enables iGEM researchers around the world to work on their innovative projects without spending weeks at a time waiting for DNA parts to be synthesized from scratch.

Global challenges in health, food, and water supply faced by humanity require a global solution. The iGEM Foundation fosters innovation and support to a new generation of synthetic biologists. With support from iGEM alumni and companies like Twist Bioscience, they will change our world for the better.

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The kids are alright: synthetic biology's training grounds now have a Twist - SynBioBeta

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "World Infectious Disease Testing Market for Over 100 Tests: A 69-Country Analysis-Supplier Shares and Strategies, Test Volume and Sales Segment Forecasts, Technology and Instrumentation Review" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The survey is designed to assist diagnostics industry executives, as well as companies planning to diversify into the dynamic and rapidly expanding infectious disease testing market, in evaluating emerging opportunities and developing effective business strategies.

The report provides granular market segmentation analysis and forecasts for over 100 microbiology tests; profiles leading suppliers and recent market entrants with innovative technologies and products; reviews current instrumentation; evaluates emerging technologies; and offers specific opportunities and strategies for suppliers.

Rationale

This comprehensive report will assist diagnostics industry executives, as well as companies planning to diversify into the dynamic and rapidly expanding infectious disease testing market, in evaluating emerging opportunities and developing effective business strategies.

The infectious disease testing is one of the most rapidly growing segments of the in vitro diagnostics industry, and the greatest challenge facing suppliers during this decade. Among the main driving forces is continuing spread of AIDS, which remains the world's major health threat and a key factor contributing to the rise of opportunistic infections; threat of bioterrorism; advances in molecular diagnostic technologies; and a wider availability of immunosuppressive drugs.

Although for some infections the etiology is still a mystery, while for others the causative microorganisms are present in minute concentrations long before the occurrence of first clinical symptoms, recent advances in genetic engineering and detection technologies are creating exciting opportunities for highly sensitive, specific and cost-effective products.

Infectious Diseases Analyzed in the Report

AIDS/HIV, Adenovirus, Aeromonads, Bartonella, Blastocystis Hominis, Campylobacter, Candida, Carbapenemase, Chancroid, Chlamydia, Clostridium, Coronavirus, Coxsackievirus, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, CMV, E. Coli, Echovirus, Encephalitis, Enterovirus, EBV, Giardia, Gonorrhea, Granuloma Inguinale, Hantavirus, H. Pylori, Hepatitis, Herpes Influenza, Legionella, Lyme Disease, Lymphogranuloma, Malaria, Measles, Meningitis, Microsporidium, Mononucleosis, Mumps, Mycoplasma, Norovirus, HPV, Parvovirus, Pneumonia, Polyomaviruses, Pseudomonas, Rabies, RSV, Rhinovirus, Rotavirus , Rubella, Salmonella, Septicemia, Shigella, Staphylococci, Streptococci, Syphilis, Toxoplasmosis, Trichomonas, TB, Vibrio, West Nile, Yersinia.

Market Segmentation Analysis

Current and Emerging Products

Technology Review

Competitive Assessments

Opportunities and Strategies for Suppliers

Companies Mentioned

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/h4rvm9

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World Infectious Disease Testing Market for Over 100 Tests, 2019 - Supplier Shares and Strategies, Test Volume and Sales Segment Forecasts, Technology...

In September 2017, when temperatures in Pakistans Gilgit-Baltistan region were mild and the thick snow blankets that block passage around the Himalayas later in the season were a still-distant threat, Sadar U. Siddiqui and his companions trekked up through the mountains on a mission to find a wild variety of chickpea. Back in Islamabad, hed visited the National Herbarium and gotten a good look at the plant species called Medicago sativa subsp. falcata that had sickle-shaped fruit and thin, spiky leaves. If the plant was somewhere out there on the precipitously rocky slopes, Siddiqui, Genebank curator of Pakistans Plant Genetic Resources Program (PGRP), had yet to find evidence of it.

One day, though, driving along no roads, only dangerous jeep tracks as the afternoon waned, Siddiqui and his companions spotted a goat finding something to eat, he says. That something was Medicago sativa subsp. falcata. The goat had ravaged the shrubby clump of plants until all that remained were a few pods and leaves. Siddiqui and his companionstaxonomist Amir Sultan and biologist Shakeel Ahmad Jatoichased the animal off. They poured seed from two or three of the remaining pods into paper sacks and counted themselves lucky. Jatoi had gone on a similar expedition to Balochistan and had found, rather than Octhochloa compressa and other species, A housing colony, cemented roads, and not a single plant, says Siddiqui.

Siddiquis efforts ran parallel to those of seed collectors from 24 developing countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, who have spent the last several years in a race against ravenous livestock, habitat loss, and the effects of climate change as they search for wild relatives of crops vital to human diets. The endeavor, called Crop Wild Relatives Project (CWRP) and overseen by the Crop Trust in Bonn and Kews Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) outside London, has three phases. Phase one was a gap analysis to identify what critical seeds were missing in gene banks in certain regions. Phase two, which Siddiqui took part in, entailed seed collecting and distribution to international gene banks. Phase three, currently ongoing, focuses on pre-breedingidentifying desirable characteristics in those collected wild seeds.

As phase three begins, the question is: Were these efforts enough to ensure longterm global food security in the face of climactic upheaval?

For all the evident diversity in your supermarket shopping cart, agriculture has a dirty secret hidden in plain sight. Only nine crops out of a 120 cultivated worldwide supply three-quarters of the energy we get from plant-based foods. A mere three cropswheat, rice, and maizesupply half of that, according to the UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). By comparison, when our ancestors began to transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture some 13,000 years ago, they were eating thousands of different plants.

Once upon a not-so-distant time, there was also much greater variety in the species of seeds that produced our wheat, rice, and maize. Wheat is the main staple crop in Pakistan, which once grew hundreds of varieties of it. That number has dwindled to 95. Almost all the remaining varieties of wheat were genetically modified to be high-yield and disease-resistant monocultures, and to grow with chemical inputs. This story repeats in many countriesChina had 10,000 varieties of wheat in 1949, but only 1,000 in 1970, and considerably fewer now. Chickpeas, barley, lentils, sorghum, pigeonpeas, carrots, apples, millet, alfalfa, sweet potatoes, and rye have all been whittled down to a handful of mostly-engineered species. Theyre controlled by massive international agrochemical conglomerates: Dow/Dupont, ChemChina/Syngenta, Bayer/Monsanto.

This precipitous drop in diversity began in the 1950s and 60s, during the Green Revolution. Confronted with a burgeoning global population, governments worked furiously to ramp up crop production in order to feed more people. A super-productive rice breed called IR8, for example, was hailed as a miracle seed and credited with staving off starvation in India, even producing enough for export; traditional rice varietals were then abandoned in its favor.

Crop-by-crop, country-by-country, weve achieved a worldwide homogeneityand genetic erosion. Its a massive threat to food security, according to a paper published in 2014 by the National Academy of Sciences that was co-written by Hannes Dempewolf, Crop Trusts senior scientist. In the words of Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, weve hit a state of seed emergency.

Crop monocultures that rely on chemical inputs are destructive to soil, water, air, and biodiversity, says the Union of Concerned Scientists. Reduced crop diversity is also bad for human health, and has been linked to upticks in conditions of over-nourishment like diabetes and obesity. Agriculture is already experiencing negative impacts from climate changefloods, droughts, extreme temperature fluctuations, earlier or later growing seasons, soil erosion, decreased pest and disease resilience, reduced nutritional value of crops. That makes this global monoculture of monocultures, all created from the same genetic building blocks, a few perfect storms or floods or fires away from being wiped out. Our commercial crops lack resistance, and theres not enough genetic diversity in the seeds weve got left to cultivate new strains to fight new battles on our fields.

This is where crop wild relatives, which geneticist Jack Harlan credited with standing between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine, come in. If we can collect enough wild seeds before the goats eat them all, we might regain the diversity we need to develop hardy crops, locally, that can weather whatever future hardships are in store on our rapidly morphing planet.

During phase twos collecting years, CWRP expeditions yielded 4,644 collections, from 371 species and 28 crop gene pools. Some of these are already being pre-bred in their countries of origin; scientists are determining their particular traits and developing germplasmliving genetic materialthat can be used to create resilient hybrids. (Notably, not all modified crops are engineered to be, say, Roundup-ready; individual farmers have been selectively breeding seeds to tap their useful properties for millennia.)

Under the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, signatory countries and gene banks agree to freely share seeds to improve crops. Companies making commercialized hybrids from these resources must contribute a portion of profits to promote sustainable farming or conservation of genetic diversity in developing countries, according to Science News.

In joining the CWRP, Pakistan stood out compared to other countries in how the project [got] a conversation going about the importance of crop wild relatives, says Dempewolf. It stimulated a national movement to conserve and collect material and use it in pre-breeding. Over two years, Siddiqui and his team bolstered Pakistans depleted seed bank collections with 2 million wild seeds from 32 species of 18 crops.

The effort was fraught with challenges on multiple fronts, though. Siddiquis gene bank staff is comprised largely of a shifting cast of temp workers; teaching them basic protocolslike how to not mislabel materialsis an ongoing struggle. The vehicles at his disposal for collecting expeditions (they continue to collect seeds on their own) are prone to breakdowns and his state funders think its luxurious for government servants to buy a double-cab 4-wheel-drive car that can [make it] into the mountains, and not get stuck in sand, he says.

Help came in various forms from the CWRP. Siddiqui and Jatoi, along with another researcher, travelled to the Millennium Seed Bank for training in seed processing, handling, germination, and viability testing. MSB also compiled a Pakistan-specific collecting guide that provided taxonomical details, info on where plants have historically been found, and when they bloom. Says Kews CWRP coordinator Christopher Cockel, such guides are valuable so you dont waste so much time going out on speculative trips.

Siddiqui did find the guide helpful, even though its accuracy could be hobbled by unexpected variables. Sometimes we couldnt [collect] seed because theyd matured earlier than expected, and sometimes we found drought conditions [and no seed], he says. Sometimes, enthusiastic locals unwittingly sent him on long wild goose chases.

Still, the team managed to collect Pakistans first-ever wild rice specimen, Oryza coarctata, in a delta near the Arabian Sea. It was the end of the season and we were not sure we could find anything, he says. But there the panicles stood in brackish water amid the tides, being munched by buffalo, with what Siddiqui feels sure is a salt-tolerant gene that will be very important for us as sea levels rise. Not least because, as a new study out of the University of Minnesota found, in developing countries like Pakistan, crop yields are already plummeting and hunger is inching upward.

Two-thirds of Oryza coarctata and all the seed Siddiqui collected were sent back to MSB. It stores ideally, 10,000 per species and sends about 100 on to crop-specific gene banks. Cereals go to the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), apples, carrots, and peas to the USDA, and bananas to KU Leuven in Belgiumbecause the worlds banana experts are based there, says Cockel. The gene banks grow out the seeds to actively regenerate them, providing them with enough to work with. Collections of these new lines of seed, which inevitably lose some of their wild traits when regenerated, are sent to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, for additional backup.

One-third of Siddiquis collected seed remains in Pakistan. The National Institute for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering in Faisalbad has started pre-breeding a chickpea wild relative; Sargodha University in Punjab is pre-breeding Daucus carota carota, a wild carrot relative. It can take a decade or longer to get them to a point where they can be crossed with modern varieties from there.

What Siddiqui really wants is a pre-breeding lab of his own, to make up for gaps in our knowledge of how to use crop wild relatives effectively. Hes got his eye on an x-ray machine like one he trained on at MSB, to determine if seed contain intact embryos that can germinate; and a hyper-efficient Austrian cooling system that uses only 1 kilowatt of energy to keep an entire stored seed collection at optimum temperature.

The collection phase of the CWRP is over. But Siddiquis ongoing 12 expeditions a year target, not just wild relatives, but indigenous heirloom varieties grown by small farmers who continue to play a key role in maintaining biological diversity, according to FAO. A new accession now growing in PGRPs botanical garden is a primitive wheat landrace found in Balochistan that contains twice the world average of zinc and iron.

Some critics of the CWRP fear the likes of Bayer/Monsanto using crop wild relatives to usher in a new era of chemical-dependent monocultures. Rescuing seeds has effectively configured a use pipeline to guide genetic resources away from the farming communities and toward breeders and biotechnologists, whose craft is strongly shaped by private sector interests in sellable seed, writes Maywa Montenegro in Gastronomica.And although the Plant Treaty stipulates that genetic materials from wild relatives cant be patented in the form received, Montenegro points out that their derived products can be. What threats to seed sovereigntythe right to collect, grow, and exchange seedfor non-commercial-scale farmers will that engender?

Dempewolf of Crop Trust maintains that seed collections are a key public good and that its the responsibility of public institutions to get engaged and not leave it to private institutions to do the right thing. But whether a large-scale model of agriculture can now be built in which agrochemical companies do not dominate, and at a scale that can make a difference, remains to be seen. At the very least, capturing some wild and landrace varietals before they vanish along with all our genetic inheritance, as Dempewolf puts it, has been accomplished.

Read more:

Can Crops' Wild Relatives Save Troubled Agriculture? - JSTOR Daily

Silicon Valley has long been the world leader in tech innovation. Its the cradle of startup culture, a hub for venture capital, and the home of dozens of global tech titans that are not only raking in billions of dollars, theyre also influencing politics, culture, and lifestyles around the worldwhether they intended to or not.

The Valleys tech dominance has gone relatively unchallenged for decades, but China is now giving American tech a run for its moneyand it happens to have some values that sharply conflict with those of the US.

Matt Sheehan, a writer, former journalist, and current fellow at MacroPolo, the in-house think tank at Chicagos Paulson Institute, is an expert when it comes to the US-China relationship, and not just in terms of technological competition. After growing up and going to school in Silicon Valley, Sheehan spent six years as a foreign correspondent for the World Post in China.

In a talk at 1871, Chicagos leading technology and entrepreneurship center, Sheehan spoke about his new book, The Transpacific Experiment: How China and California Collaborate and Compete for Our Future. The competition for technological dominance between China and the US has many layers, and Sheehan brings to light the fact that neither country would be where it is today, innovation-wise, without the other. But this symbiotic relationship is laced with complexity, and now is the time to steer it in a direction that will continue to benefit, rather than harm, both countries.

The diplomatic relationship between China and the US takes place in government offices and private meetings (and, under the current administration, on Twitter). But Sheehan believes that a lot of the most important pieces of the US-China relationship are happening at the grassroots level.

Its about Chinese students at US universitieshow do they relate to their classmates, professors, and institutions? Its Chinese homebuyers coming to my hometown (Palo Alto) and buying houseshow do they relate to their neighbors? he said.

While these interactions might seem insignificant compared to, say, a visit by Donald Trump to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader and president Xi Jinping, Sheehan thinks its the local interaction of people, money, and ideas that really shapes what happens at the national level.

But when theres a disconnect between whats happening at a local level and what happens at the national level, things get tricky. And this is the root of what Sheehan sees as Silicon Valleys China paradox: Though theres been a consistent exchange of people, money, and ideas between the US and China, the two countries are becoming steadily more divided, as are the tech companies that have blossomed in each one.

While you have these free flows of people and money and ideas, companies themselves are functionally blocked from each others markets, Sheehan said. US companies are blocked in China, and Chinese companies cant gain traction in the US.

Take the story of entrepreneur Li Zhifei. Li was born and raised in central China, worked at a Beijing startup in the late 90s, then came to the US to do a PhD in computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He then moved to Silicon Valley to work as a researcher for Google Translate, staying there for two years before moving back to China to found his own (now wildly successful) startup, Mobvoi. A key factor in Mobvois success was Chinas decision to block Google, thereby making space for home-grown innovation in what would otherwise be Google territory. Somewhat surprisingly, Google invested in Mobvoi in 2015, perhaps partially in hopes that Mobvoi will eventually help Google re-enter the Chinese market.

Mobvoi is one product among many of Chinas Great Firewall, which this refers to the CCPs efforts to keep global tech leaders out of Chinas digital space and to control domestic information and communication channels. A major side effect, intended or not, has been to nurture Chinas digital economy and encourage domestic brands to dominate the market. Instead of Google, China has Baidu. Instead of Twitter, Weibo. Instead of Facebook, WeChat. Instead of Amazon, Alibaba. And so on.

Many of the Chinese entrepreneurs behind these companies and others studied at American universities and worked at Silicon Valley companies before going home to launch their own startups. But its not just Chinese companies and citizens that are benefiting; According to Sheehan, China is the leading source of foreign AI talent in the US. American tech companies have looked to Chinese products like WeChat for inspiration for their own products. Apple and other American consumer electronics brands wouldnt be able to sell their products nearly as cheaply without Chinese manufacturing operations.

But the US-China relationship is becoming more strained. The sources of Chinas massive economic growth over the past three decadesinfrastructure investment, urbanization, cheap labor thanks to a big working-age populationare getting close to being tapped out, and to continue its forward trajectory, China needs new sources of growth. As its economy transitions from manufacturing to service, tech is at its center, creating jobs and fueling demand for goods and services.

For American companies to get access to the huge Chinese market, they have to comply with the CCPs demands, which can be in direct contrast with their own mission statements. Google, for example, purportedly aims to make any kind of information freely accessible to anyonebut if they want to do business in China, they have to censor search results.

In fact, the CCP has succeeded in doing what American tech entrepreneurs once thought impossible: undermined the concept of the internet itself, which was meant to be an unconstrained flow of ideas and information across national boundaries, but in China is tightly monitored and controlled.

Both China and the US (companies as well as governments) want to exert their influence abroad, but that influence takes very different shapes from one country to the other. Chinas treatment of its Uighur people, its use of facial recognition technology and a social credit scoring system to police citizens, the protests in Hong Kong, and its efforts to export authoritarian ideology to developing nations all illustrate the stark disconnect in values between the two nations. Meanwhile, China is moving fast in key fields like genetic engineering and AI thanks to its huge population and lax approach to data privacy.

By Sheehans somewhat bleak assessment, there are two ways to resolve the tension between China and the US: open up full integration of the two places, or separate them completely, closing down the transpacific flow of people and ideas. He believes were moving towards the latter.

The US is blocking investment from China in Silicon Valley and limiting how many Chinese students can study here, he said. There are ethical and business reasons for that, but were just now learning about the potential costs of decoupling. What does it mean if we pull apart this relationship at all levels?

The implications will be far-reaching, whether that happens or not; as Sheehan writes in the final chapter of his book, How the United States and China relate to each other in the years to come will have profound consequences for people in every corner of the globe. The seeds that have been planted on both sides of the Pacific, he continues, have begun to sprout, but it will be years or decades before they bear fruit.

Sheehan concluded his talk by urging us to seek understanding, from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels. As we go forward, the way that we need to balance these and strike a good policy path in the US is to understand the relationship from the ground up and from the top down, to see it both from Silicon Valleys perspective and from DCs perspective, he said.

Image Credit: Image by jian gao from Pixabay

More:

Silicon Valley's China Paradox: What It Is, and How It Will Shape the Future of Tech - Singularity Hub

FT819 Exhibits Enhanced Tumor Clearance In Vivo Compared to Primary CAR T Cells in Preclinical Leukemia Model

Master Engineered iPSC Line for FT819 Fully Characterized for Complete Elimination of TCR Expression and Integration of Novel 1XX CAR into TRAC Locus with No Evidence of Off-target Effects

Company Plans to Submit an IND Application for FT819 during 1H20

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 10, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fate Therapeutics, Inc. (FATE), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of programmed cellular immunotherapies for cancer and immune disorders, announced new in vivo preclinical data for FT819, its first off-the-shelf, iPSC-derived chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell product candidate, at the 61st American Society of Hematology (ASH) Meeting and Exposition in Orlando, Florida.

FT819 is derived from a clonal master engineered induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) line with complete elimination of T-cell receptor (TCR) expression and a novel 1XX CAR targeting CD19 inserted into the T-cell receptor alpha constant (TRAC) locus. The cell product candidate is being developed under a collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) led by Michel Sadelain, M.D., Ph.D. The Company has now selected a single engineered iPSC clone, and generated and fully-characterized the master engineered iPSC bank for GMP production of FT819.

CAR T-cell therapy continues to deliver remarkable outcomes for patients with hematologic malignancies, and next-generation approaches are needed to enable broad and timely patient access and reduce the cost and complexity of therapy, said Scott Wolchko, President and Chief Executive Officer of Fate Therapeutics. With early evidence of clinical activity for our off-the-shelf, iPSC-derived NK cell programs, we are excited to lead in bringing next-generation CAR T-cell therapies to patients and plan to submit an IND for FT819 in the first half of 2020.

The Companys iPSC product platform unites stem cell biology and precision genetic engineering to create renewable master engineered iPSC lines that can be repeatedly used to mass produce cancer-fighting immune cells, replacing the high production costs, weeks of manufacturing time, and complex engineering processes required for current-generation CAR T-cell immunotherapies with an off-the-shelf product that has the potential to reach many more patients.

At ASH, scientists from the Company and MSK presented new in vivo preclinical data demonstrating that FT819 exhibits durable tumor control and extended survival. In a stringent xenograft model of disseminated lymphoblastic leukemia, FT819 demonstrated enhanced tumor clearance and control of leukemia as compared to primary CAR19 T cells. At Day 35 following administration, a bone marrow assessment showed that FT819 persisted and continued to demonstrate tumor clearance, whereas primary CAR T cells, while persisting, were not able to control tumor growth. Over the past twelve months, the collaboration team has worked to optimize its processes for making T cells from iPSCs, and has now shown the production of pure T-lymphocytes consisting of both CD8+ and CD4+ T cells having a global gene expression profile that is highly-similar to primary T cells based on a principal component analysis.

As proof-of-principle for the unique advantages arising from selecting a single engineered iPSC clone for the production of CAR T-cell therapy, the scientists assessed 747 clones after engineering a pool of cells using CRISPR. It was found that only about 2% of clones met the Companys standards for overall quality including containing both bi-allelic disruption of the TCR, proper insertion of the CAR into the TRAC locus without random transgene integrations, and no evidence of off-target genomic modifications or translocations. The Company selected the top-performing clone for generation of the master engineered iPSC bank for GMP production of FT819.

Fate Therapeutics has exclusively licensed from MSK foundational intellectual property covering the production and composition of iPSC-derived T cells. In August, the Company announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent No. 10,370,452 covering compositions and uses of effector T cells expressing a CAR, where such T cells are derived from a pluripotent stem cell, including an iPSC. The foundational patent, which expires in 2034, is owned by MSK and is licensed exclusively to Fate Therapeutics for all human therapeutic uses.

Story continues

About Fate Therapeutics iPSC Product PlatformThe Companys proprietary induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) product platform enables mass production of off-the-shelf, engineered, homogeneous cell products that can be administered with multiple doses to deliver more effective pharmacologic activity, including in combination with cycles of other cancer treatments. Human iPSCs possess the unique dual properties of unlimited self-renewal and differentiation potential into all cell types of the body. The Companys first-of-kind approach involves engineering human iPSCs in a one-time genetic modification event and selecting a single engineered iPSC for maintenance as a clonal master iPSC line. Analogous to master cell lines used to manufacture biopharmaceutical drug products such as monoclonal antibodies, clonal master iPSC lines are a renewable source for manufacturing cell therapy products which are well-defined and uniform in composition, can be mass produced at significant scale in a cost-effective manner, and can be delivered off-the-shelf for patient treatment. As a result, the Companys platform is uniquely capable of overcoming numerous limitations associated with the production of cell therapies using patient- or donor-sourced cells, which is logistically complex and expensive and is subject to batch-to-batch and cell-to-cell variability that can affect clinical safety and efficacy. Fate Therapeutics iPSC product platform is supported by an intellectual property portfolio of over 250 issued patents and 150 pending patent applications.

About Fate Therapeutics, Inc.Fate Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the development of first-in-class cellular immunotherapies for cancer and immune disorders. The Company has established a leadership position in the clinical development and manufacture of universal, off-the-shelf cell products using its proprietary induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) product platform. The Companys immuno-oncology product candidates include natural killer (NK) cell and T-cell cancer immunotherapies, which are designed to synergize with well-established cancer therapies, including immune checkpoint inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies, and to target tumor-associated antigens with chimeric antigen receptors (CARs). The Companys immuno-regulatory product candidates include ProTmune, a pharmacologically modulated, donor cell graft that is currently being evaluated in a Phase 2 clinical trial for the prevention of graft-versus-host disease, and a myeloid-derived suppressor cell immunotherapy for promoting immune tolerance in patients with immune disorders. Fate Therapeutics is headquartered in San Diego, CA. For more information, please visit http://www.fatetherapeutics.com.

Forward-Looking StatementsThis release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 including statements regarding the safety and therapeutic potential of the Companys cell product candidates, including FT819, its ongoing and planned clinical studies, and the expected clinical development plans for FT819. These and any other forward-looking statements in this release are based on management's current expectations of future events and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those set forth in or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risk that the Company may cease or delay planned development and clinical trials of any of its product candidates for a variety of reasons (including any delay in enrolling patients in current and planned clinical trials, requirements that may be imposed by regulatory authorities on the conduct of clinical trials or to support regulatory approval, difficulties in manufacturing or supplying the Companys product candidates for clinical testing, or the occurrence of any adverse events or other negative results that may be observed during development), the risk that results observed in preclinical studies of its product candidates, including FT819, may not be replicated in future clinical trials or studies, and the risk that its product candidates may not produce therapeutic benefits or may cause other unanticipated adverse effects. For a discussion of other risks and uncertainties, and other important factors, any of which could cause the Companys actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see the risks and uncertainties detailed in the Companys periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the Companys most recently filed periodic report, and from time to time in the Companys press releases and other investor communications.Fate Therapeutics is providing the information in this release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contact:Christina TartagliaStern Investor Relations, Inc.212.362.1200christina@sternir.com

The rest is here:

Fate Therapeutics Presents its First Off-the-shelf, iPSC-derived CAR T-Cell Cancer Immunotherapy Program at ASH Annual Meeting - Yahoo Finance

Not only is it the end of a year this month, but its also the end of a decade. After ten long years, we can say goodbye to the 2010s and hello to the 2020s.

Along with looking at data pulled by other companies on the top movies, songs, artists, and more of the last ten years, I asked people what their opinions were on the last ten years. I was surprised at their responses.

Majority of the respondents were on the younger side and female. 89.47% of voters were female, leaving the remaining 10.53% as male. (And yes, I did allow people to not answer their gender, but nobody clicked that.) 5.26% of voters are 65 or older, 52.63% are 18-24, and the remaining 42.11% are under 18 years old. All responders were left anonymous.

I askedrespondentsthe following questions:

-How old are you now?

-How old were you at the beginning of the decade?

-What is your preferred gender?

-What was your favorite song from 2010-2019?

-What was your favorite movie from 2010-2019?

-What was your favorite memory from 2010-2019?

-What big accomplishment happened between 2010-2019 for you?

-What was your favorite meme from the decade?

-What was your favorite show from 2010-2019?

-What is your favorite thing that has come out in the last decade (food, drink, toy, clothing item, brand, etc.)

And the answers ranged from cute, to sad, to funny, to serious. But as people answered, it made me realize how many things did happen in the last decade. Like ten years ago we didnt have Alexa, Google Homes, tablets, Curiosity (the space vehicle on Mars), Augmented Reality, human like robots, genetic engineering, hoverboards, smart watches, drone delivery, Spotify, and as one responder from the survey said, Noodles Zoodles. Could you imagine a world where you couldnt get your Top Artists of the Year data? Yeah, me neither.

Album covers including newer and older artists.

Want to take a wild guess at the top songs over the last decade? Well here it is:

5) Girls Like You by Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B

4) Closer by The Chainsmokers featuring Halsey

3) Shape of You by Ed Sheeran

2) Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO featuring Lauren Bennett andGoonRock

And the number one song of the decade is none other than Uptown Funk by MarkRonsonfeaturing Bruno Mars.

You can find the other 95 hits over the last ten years athttps://www.billboard.com/charts/decade-end/hot-100

However only one survey respondent said their favorite song was a part of the top five. Other people commented that their favorites included Lights Up by Harry Styles, 22 by Taylor Swift, Juice by Lizzo, Need You Now by Lady Antebellum, Flicker by Niall Horan, Hurts Like Heaven by Coldplay, and more.

Now moving on to TV shows and movies of the last decade. Everyone knows how Marvel has taken over Hollywood with 23 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the MCU in the last decade. They also beat out Avatar this year with Avengers: End Game. But those movies werent the only ones people enjoyed (although they were personally my favorites). People also enjoyed Baby Driver, The Greatest Showman, Tangled, IT Chapter One and Two, Into theSpiderverse, Frozen and Frozen 2, Shutter Island, and Love, Simon.

I bet you forgot that the last three Twilight movies, the last two Harry Potter movies, and all the Hunger Games movies came out in the last ten years. In all honesty, it feels like it was a lot longer than that.

Image via Charles on UnsplashJust a glance at what you can view on Netflix a streaming platform that has grown in the last decade.

Survey respondents also gave their favorite TV shows over the last year and they really pushed to have some shows count as part of the last decade. Especially the numerous amounts of people who put Hannah Montana which started in 2006 and ended in 2011, but they argued it technically was airing in this decade. So, well let it slide. People also put down The Vampire Diaries, The 100, The Office, Supernatural, Stranger Things, The Goldbergs, American Horror Story, Oak Island, and Criminal Minds.

And although lots of things have happened in the last decade, like people graduating, people getting married, people came out, people started working, and people retired, there was one thing nobody could escape. And those were the memes.

I asked people to submit their favorite memes and well Im pleased to say the least. (Although side note there was someone whosaid and I quote None. I think memes are dumb ) However those memes included: The Area 51 Raid, Im Fine (Dog on Fire), You Almost Made Me Drop My Croissant, The Lady Screaming at the Cat, Gabe the Dog, Grumpy Cat, Blinking White Guy, and the Good vs Bad Kermit. It was a beautiful decade for memes. Vine was even a thing from 2013-2017 before it shut down and TikTok took over.

If youre curious about some of the top songs, tv shows, movies, or anything else that has happened in the last decade, you can check out the Billboard 100 (https://www.billboard.com/charts/decade-end/hot-100), IMDb (https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/), or Buzzfeed has some funny articles and quizzes where you can figure out how much you remember from the last decade (https://www.buzzfeed.com/)

Hopefully this last decade was memorable and you had a great 2019! Heres to a new decade and a new year! 2020 here we come.

Read the original:

The Final Moments of the 2010's - Pinnacle

The average American consumes about one ton of food each year. Livestock chomp on approximately 50 billion servings of grain and other foods annually. Together, these figures represent trillions of meals since 1996, when crops modified by biotechnology, mostly corn and soybeans, but also alfalfa, potatoes, squash and papaya, went on sale in the United States.

How many deaths or illnesses have been linked to genetically modified crops? Not one. Not so much as a sniffle.

Thats not a surprise to scientists, as almostevery food-related expert and every major oversight or regulatory body in the world has concluded that biotech crops are as safe for human and animal consumption as food grown conventionally or organically. These conclusions should have put the GMO controversy to rest years ago, but misinformation still swirls. And as anyone familiar with Europes continued opposition to cultivating GMO and gene-edited crops knows, skepticism of genetic engineering shows no signs of fading.

Some crops have been approved for cultivation in the EU but few are grown. Spain is the largest producer, with GMO corn representing about 20% of its output. Smaller amounts are grown in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Portugal, Romania and Poland. But because of near-hysterical consumer and political opposition, almost no GMO-derived foods are available in supermarkets (the relatively small amount of maize is used for animal feed). Because of its role as a major global trading partner, and the oversized influence of its anti-biotechnology environmental groups, Europe has spread its ideology to much of Africa and Asia.

So, how did a movement so at odds with accepted science catch on and continue to thrive?

According to a November 2019 study published in European Management Journal by Bayer Crop Science researchers, the answer can mostly be explained by the impact of social media, which thrives on disinformation. After examining the popularity of 94,993 unique online articles about GMOs between 2009 and 2019, the researchers concluded that this digital landscape has attracted organizations (such as the Non-GMO Project) and ideologically sympathetic activists who have used social media to dominate the discussion about crop biotechnology. These groups and individuals represent:

. a new kind of competitor that seeks to monetize attention to disrupt, disparage, and support alternative campaigns through misleading information . Preliminary results suggest that a small group of alternative health and pro-conspiracy sites received more totals engagements on social media than sites commonly regarded as media outlets on the topic of GMOs.

Some people may immediately challenge the study, as it was written by researchers at Bayer Crop Science, which was previously Monsanto. Despite the obvious concern that the authors conclusions are self-serving after all, Monsanto has been the target of anti-GMO activists for more than two decades there is much in this report worth pondering. The study examines the strategies and incentives driving the mobilization of disinformation, and highlights data that illustrate how effectively crop biotech critics undermine the publics confidence in mainstream science.

In the era of fake news dominated by partisan coverage of impeachment hearings, perhaps the most important takeaway from the analysis is that consumers are increasingly dependent on unaccountable social media platforms that reward the spread of sensationalism and disinformationoften with devastating results.

Social media allows its users to interact with more people than ever before and consume information from an effectively unlimited number of sources, the authors note. These arent inherently negative attributes; indeed, this kind of open access enables people to educate themselves and network in ways that werent possible just two decades ago. But theres a steep downside. In the environment created by Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, people who can weave convincing narratives (whether true or not) exploit consumers confirmation biases and desire to share the same views as their tribal peers, as the researchers explained:

Users or readers tend to believe what they see on their computer screen . Humans are story seekers, so intuitively follow a (compelling) storyline . Adding to all of this are the base human cognitive habits of confirmation bias, bandwagon effect, or herd mentality where citizens tend to conform their beliefs about science, society, and risks to beliefs that predominate among their peers.

For example, the Non-GMO Project took totweeting about five countries supposedly imposing bans on glyphosate, a controversial herbicide paired with biotech crops. The tweet itself was misleading as two of the countries (Austria and Thailand) have since halted their bans, and a third, Germany, imposed a ban that takes force four years from now, and scientists are already unified in challenging it.

But no matter. The clever post served its purpose. Those in the US who read the tweet, and it was aimed at them, were unlikely to question its veracity and even less likely to seek out evidence analyzing the rationale for such a ban. The Non-GMO project has no incentive to play straight with the facts and Twitter users have no reason to scrutinize the Tweet. GLP reached out to the Non-GMO Project for its response to the study, but received no reply.

The example illustrates how social medias free-for-all-environment rewards attention seeking over factual communication. This effect is often magnified because Twitter prioritizes loud and provocative over measured and balanced; disinformation captures attention. The scale of the problem is immense as almost 3.5 billion people use social media daily.

The popular appeal and often sensational nature of disinformation attracts millions of readers,' the researchers noted. And because it attracts the masses, it can be weaponized to undermine or target products, people, and ideas and ultimately used for monetary gain.

While legacy news outlets like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal attract a sizable readership when they cover crop biotechnology, the numbers pale in comparison to alternative news sources that rely on social media to amplify their message. These include well-trafficked activist sites like Mercola, Natural Newsor Sustainable Pulse, and news sites like RT (formerly Russia Today), which has been lambasted by biotech experts for its dubious coverage of agriculture. All these outlets advance counter-consensus narratives about GMO safety, thus influencing the broader discussion about biotechnology, and turn a profit while doing it. As Cami Ryan, a social scientist with Bayer and one of the studys co-authors, told the GLP by email:

In the case of GMOs, its likely that motivations behind this movement include efforts to both sway public opinion and for monetary gain. Based on our initial analysis of the data, it appears that for the $26B non-GMO project to be as successful as it is, there needed to be a market for it. And that market was built on disinformation.

Scientific consensus vs social consensus

If you want to encourage a certain behavior, you pay people to engage in it. Social media platforms in effect pay activists (already motivated by ideology) to spread questionable narratives by rewarding deceptive messaging with higher readership, advertising revenue and natural product sales. This incentive structure helps create a scenario in which societys views on a given issue are increasingly divorced from the relevant facts, and the consequences can be devastating, as the authors concluded:

The socioeconomic costs of disinformation campaigns as illustrated in the case of GMOs are significant . [L]ess visible costs are diminished confidence in science, and the loss of important innovations and foregone innovation capacities. The most deleterious effect . may be to smallholder farmers in developing countries. Unnecessary social and political controversy about GM crops create barriers to access to technologies for those that stand to benefit from them the most.

Can anything be done to clean up our corrupted public discourse about biotechnology?

We are not making recommendations on how to stop [online disinformation] nor would we presume to know where to begin, Ryan added in her email to the GLP. Critical thinking is required to differentiate between what is disinformation and what is not and that always starts with increased awareness that it even exists in the first place. Scientists have accelerated this awareness effort by getting on social media, starting podcasts and writing directly for the public, but this has yet to solve the problem.

One other possibility not discussed in the new study is that the benefits of new technologies may eventually overwhelm the fear that stifles innovation. The plant-based Impossible Burger, for instance, has proven enormously popular with American consumers because of its remarkable similarity to beef and perceived environmental benefits, even though it contains GMO-derived soy. Gene-edited crops with qualities that appeal to consumers offer a related case study of how innovation could counter the effects of social media disinformation. Yet useful products arent a surefire solution to anti-science activism, as the medical community has discovered with vaccines.

So, while progress has been made in countering the spread of online disinformation, the fact remains that social media is still a relatively new phenomenon whose effects on human behavior are not fully understood. As a result, the unsatisfactory answer to how do we control the spread of disinformation? may be we dont know yet.

Cameron J. English is the GLPs senior agricultural genetics and special projects editor. He is a science writer and podcast host. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish

Originally posted here:

'Natural health' and conspiracy sites exploit social media to fester opposition to GMO crops. Here's a study about what can be done to stop it -...

When plants come under attack from invading bacteria, viruses or fungi, they mount a two-pronged response, producing both offensive chemicals to kill invaders and defensive chemicals to prevent infestations from spreading.

Now, scientists at Stanford have used a type of chemical vaccine to switch on this plant defense system to prevent localized infections from becoming contagions, a possible first step toward helping harvests ward off infections.

In a reportpublishedOct. 22 inScience Signaling,a team led by plant biologistMary Beth Mudgettand chemical engineerElizabeth Sattelydescribe how they saved tomato and pepper plants from bacterial speck, the common name for a bacterial infestation that can spread from leaf to leaf, turning leaves yellow and ultimately killing the plants.

They accomplished this by treating uninfected leaves with a newly discovered and naturally occurring chemical called N-hydroxy-pipecolic acid, referred to as NHP. This chemical agent, in turn, triggered a series of chemical responses that made uninfected leaves less hospitable to pathogens seeking to invade.

It was only last year that our team and another group discovered how NHP flipped on this defensive system in plants in the lab, said Mudgett, who is a professor of biology. This time we made NHP and showed that we could use it as an inoculant to switch on this defense mechanism in crop plants, as well.

Sattely, who is an associate professor of chemical engineering,said the findings have significance beyond tomatoes and peppers. The team analyzed the genomes of more than 50 plants, including corn and soybeans. Many of these species have the genetic machinery to produce at least small quantities of NHP, which suggests that they may also have the potential to create self-protective chemical shields. Now, having shown that an extra dose of NHP triggered this self-defense system in tomatoes and peppers, she thinks that it might be possible to splice the NHP genes into commercial plants to boost their natural defenses.

Thats where were headed but first we need to understand more about the biology, Sattely said. Nature is all about trade-offs. If we engineer a plant to devote more energy to defense, then how would that affect growth? So far we dont know.

This study is a continuation of a fruitful collaboration between Mudgett and Sattely that began after graduate student Jakub Rajniak in Sattelys lab discovered NHP in laboratory plants. Yun-Chu Chen, a postdoctoral scholar in Mudgetts lab, and Eric Holmes, a graduate student working with Sattely, then found that NHP activates a system known as systemic acquired resistance or SAR that creates a chemical defense shield to protect uninfected tissues. Scientists previously knew about that defense system, but hadnt known what activated it.

The new studies in tomatoes and peppers sought to determine whether NHP triggered the acquired resistance response in these plants as well. To find out, Chen and Holmes administered NHP on the underside of tomato and pepper leaves. They then infected leaves with the bacterium that causes bacterial speck. All of the treated plants remained free of disease symptoms, suggesting that the NHP had activated resistance throughout the plants tissues. Plants that had water applied to their leaves instead of NHP succumbed to the infection.

Chen and Holmes then wanted to find out if they could engineer the production of NHP in tomatoes and whether that internal NHP would also activate resistance. To find out, they put the genes needed to produce NHP into tomato plants. Cells within those plants began to produce NHP, which activated their SAR defenses and prevented the development of bacterial speck.

Eventually, the researchers would like to insert the two NHP-producing genes into the seed stock of food crops and grow test plants in laboratory greenhouses to learn whether they can boost SAR defenses plant-wide and see how this would affect a plants overall physiology.

We want to improve plants natural defenses using genetic engineering, Sattely said.

Mudgett thinks that boosting NHP production could be used to help crops defend themselves against unexpected infectious agents. Unlike human vaccines, which protect against a specific pathogen, like pertussis or the flu, once NHP flips on the SAR defense the resulting chemical shield seems to deflect a broad array of pathogens. This natural plant compound combined with other disease resistance traits in crops could be a promising way to prevent multiple pathogen outbreaks, Mudgett said.

Today we develop crops to resist a specific disease and when the pathogen mutates and overcomes the resistance trait, we start over, she said. This may be a way to defend against many threats at the same time.

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Scientists have developed a vaccine to protect tomato... - ScienceBlog.com

Partnership will leverage Bit Bios unique ability to generate authentic human cells at scale

Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. (NYSE: CRL) today announced that it has entered into an exclusive Discovery and Safety Services partnership with Bit Bio, a company that offers consistent and efficient reprogramming of human cells for use in research, drug discovery, and cell therapies.

By applying an engineering approach to synthetic and stem cell biology, Bit Bio has developed proprietary technologies for the efficient, consistent, and scalable reprogramming of induced pluripotent stem cells.

Cellular Reprogramming

Cellular reprogramming is the process by which human stem cells, given a precise set of genetic instructions, differentiate into a desired cell type. Current cellular reprogramming approaches are inefficient, with low cell yields, creating a gap for applications requiring high quality, consistent, and pure human cells.

To overcome this hurdle, Bit Bio has developed a gene engineering approach, opti-ox (optimised inducible over-expression). This platform, validated on both muscle and brain cells, enables precise, controllable stem cell reprogramming. According to Bit Bio, the process is more efficient and scalable than available technologies in transforming stem cells into desired cell types.

By combining the purity, scale, and speed of the opti-ox platform with deep learning algorithms, Bit Bio has the potential to accelerate the discovery and application of every single human cell type.

Partnering for Translational Drug Development

By partnering with Bit Bio, Charles River plans to offer clients access to an expanding suite of authentic human cells through their use in target discovery, validation and screening services. In drug discovery and safety, the use of high quality, authentic human cells at scale will enable the development of therapies with a higher chance of success in patients. Additionally, through the partnership, Charles River will contribute to the development and validation of novel cell lines.

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About Charles River

Charles River provides essential products and services to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, government agencies and leading academic institutions around the globe accelerate their research and drug development efforts. Our dedicated employees are focused on providing clients with exactly what they need to improve and expedite the discovery, early-stage development and safe manufacture of new therapies for the patients who need them. To learn more about our unique portfolio and breadth of services, visit http://www.criver.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191210005520/en/

Contacts

Investor Contact: Todd SpencerCorporate Vice President, Investor Relations781-222-6455todd.spencer@crl.com

Media Contacts: Amy CianciarusoCorporate Vice President, Public Relations781-222-6168amy.cianciaruso@crl.com

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Charles River Announces Strategic Partnership with Bit Bio, Increasing Portfolio of Translational Drug Discovery Technologies - Yahoo Finance

tech2 News StaffDec 11, 2019 11:30:07 IST

A mathematics professor from Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata has become the youngest person to ever receive the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize at the age of 35.Dr Neena Guptawasawarded the Prizeforhaving solved a 70-year-old mathematics puzzle called the Zariski Cancellation Problem.Dr Guptais not just the youngest, but alsoonlythe third woman to win the honourtill date.

Gupta is an Associate Professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit at ISI, Kolkata. She graduated with an Honours in Mathematics from Bethune College, Kolkata in 2006, after whichshe went on tostudy Mathematics at the post-graduate level from ISI. She entered the Indian academic ring witha PhD in Algebraic Geometry.Guptahasalso won theIndian National Science AcademyYoung Scientist Award in 2014 for her work on theZariski Cancellation Problem, soon after she first published her research paper on it in 2014.

Mathematician Dr Neena Gupta shines as the youngest Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awardee ever. Image: Research Matters

Inrecent years, Dr Gupta has provided solutions to two open problems in mathematics one, posed by Oscar Zariski (1899-1986), one of the founders of modern Algebraic Geometry.Gupta describes these open mathematical conjectures as problems which can be easily explained to mathematicians but are very difficult to solve, in an interview with Research Matters. The 'Zariski Cancellation Problem', which has earned Gupta the SSB prize,hasintrigued mathematicians around the globe ever since a version of it was proposed by O Zariski in 1949.

Bythe early 21st century, several eminent mathematicians had triedtheir hand at asolve forthe Zariski Cancellation Problem, which remained open for about 70 years before Gupta's complete solution came alongin 2014.

"I knew this problem right from my PhD days, but I never imagined that I will be able to solve it," shetold Research Matters. The solutions provided by Dr Gupta have given both insights and inspiration to young researchers as they can initiate research into other associated conjectures, which remain open.

[For a deeper dive into the mathematics and complexities of her solution, head here.]

The Zariski Cancellation Problem is a 70-year-old algebraic problem.

The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize is announced every year on 26 September to celebrate the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR) Foundation Day.This prize is given out to recognise a handful of scientists and researchers across many disciplines for having madeoutstanding contributions to science and technology in India.The awards are given outacross seven categories,andinclude a citation, a commemorative plaque, a cashprize of Rs 5 lakh, and additionally, an endowment of 15,000 per month up to the age of 65 years. They receive an award from the Prime Minister.

There are seven categories in the following disciplines- Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Medical Sciences, Physical Sciences.

Twelve scientists from different institutions across the country have been chosen for the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for 2019. The winners of the awards include Dr Kayarat Saikrishnan of Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune and Dr Soumen Basak of National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi (biological sciences), Dr Raghavan B Sunoj of IIT, Bombay and Dr Tapas Kumar Maji of Jawahar Lal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru (Chemical Sciences), and Dr Dishant Mayur Bhai Pancholi of Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, and Dr Neena Gupta of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata (Mathematical Sciences).

Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar on the postage stamp. Image credit: Wikipedia

The other scientists on the list also include Dr Dheeraj Kumar of International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi and Dr Mohammad Javed Ali of LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad (Medical Sciences), Dr Aninda Sinha of IISc, Bengaluru, and Dr Shankar Ghosh of TIFR, Mumbai (Physical Sciences), Dr Subimal Ghosh of IIT, Bombay (Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences), and Dr ManikVarma (Microsoft Research India, Bengaluru (Engineering Sciences).

Dr Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar was the Founder Director and the first Director-General of CSIR and is considered to be "the Father of research laboratories" in India. He got this monikerfor having established twelve nationally-recognised laboratoriesover the course of his lifetime.

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At 35, Dr Neena Gupta is the youngest awardee of Shan.. Prize for cracking 70-year-old mathematics conundrum - Firstpost

More than ever, the systemic and slowly unfolding problems in our world today will define my generation. From petroleum-based production to antibiotic resistance to the need to feed 9 billion people by 2050, we are converging upon our day of reckoning.

Unlike steam, coal, or electricity, I see the power of synthetic biology in the fact that people and our planet are biological.

In healthcare, a better understanding of biology will herald new drug discovery, living medicines, personalized healthcare, and gene therapy. We could combat climate change by engineering photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to biofuel or animal feed. And if we leave Earth, engineering biology will enable us to bring life to barren planets.

There is a deep-seated and somewhat existential fear that opening Pandoras box to solve one problem will lead to greater tragedies. Even if they may not be a direct result of my actions, I know I will share the responsibility. With the increasingly complex ethical implications of engineering life, it is clear that innovation in synthetic biology must be matched by equally fundamental changes in the structure and discourse of society.

Read full, original post: Synthetic biology: the inheritance of my generation

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Viewpoint: Synthetic biology, and the quest to engineer life, will define a generation - Genetic Literacy Project