Most people look at the cedar in Drew Endy's front yard and admire its graceful green boughs, heavy with needles, sap and cones. <\/p>\n
Endy sees something much different: an industrial manufacturing platform, waiting to be exploited. <\/p>\n
\"I dream we could someday reprogram trees that could self-assemble a computer chip in your front yard,\" exudes the brilliant and intense Stanford University scientist, who has emerged as a leading evangelist in the new field of synthetic biology. <\/p>\n
One gene at a time, Endy and other elite teams of Bay Area scientists are striving to design and build organisms unlike anything made by Mother Nature. <\/p>\n
It's not yet possible to create artificial life from scratch. But it's getting closer, through projects that essentially swap out a cell's original operating system for a lab-designed one. These made-to-order creations then can be put to work. <\/p>\n
The Human Genome Project gave us the ability to read nature's instruction manual -- DNA -- like words in a book. But the real opportunities, scientists say, lie in our ability to not only read genetic code, but to write it, then build it using off-the-shelf chemical ingredients, strung together like holiday lights. It is the creation of new genomes -- and a new frontier in bioengineering. <\/p>\n
Synthetic biology works because biological creatures are, in essence, programmable manufacturing systems. The DNA instruction manual buried inside every cell -- its software, in a <\/p>\n
This presages the distant day when Endy's big Menlo Park cedar churns out computer chips, not cones. Or makes cancer-fighting drugs. Or fuels. Or building materials. Or anything else. <\/p>\n
There are concerns about safety and ethics. In the wrong hands, lone villains or rogue regimes could unleash dangerous life forms. A review in 2010 by a White House commission concluded the field needs monitoring, but the risks are still limited. <\/p>\n
Synthetic biology is different from genetic engineering, which simply inserts a gene from one organism into another. <\/p>\n
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Original post: Most people look at the cedar in Drew Endy's front yard and admire its graceful green boughs, heavy with needles, sap and cones. Continue reading
\nSynthetic biology: Engineering a new frontier<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"