Hacking the President’s DNA
Almost a year ago, I collaborated with Future Crimes visionary Marc Goodman and bestselling author and writer Steven Kotler to speculate how the advances in personalized medicine could be co-opted for less than altruistic purposes. We submitted the article to the Atlantic Magazine. The article appears in November 2012 issue, on your newsstand now. (Here’s the online...
iGEM Regionals complete, now onto World Championship
The iGEM genetic engineering competition regional events are over and now teams are heading to the World Championship, to be held at MIT in Cambridge November 2-5. The regional results can be found here. Overall, 190 teams from over 30 countries are participating and the competition is fierce! See you there! Recent News Articles iGEM Bioengineering...
Are dreams of Jurassic Park extinct?
A paper published October 10, 2012 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences attempts to measure the half life of DNA. (Full text not available for free but a good overview can be found here in Nature news.) By measuring the decay of mitochondrial DNA in bone samples of the extinct New Zealand...
DNA made into rewritable memory
Scientists have successfully turned DNA rewritable memory. Stanford researcher Drew Endy and his team have, using elements from a bacteriophage, built and demonstrated a rewritable recombinase addressable data (RAD) module. The system consists of a stretch of DNA flanked by sites that signal to enzymes made by the bacteriophage, instructing them to cut out the...
Time to write human genomes
In 1990, scientists launched one of the largest international collaborations in life science, an effort to sequence the human genome. This work inspired a new generation of genetic researchers and led to countless breakthroughs in new technologies, informatics, and medicine. I was one of the researchers who had their careers launched by this effort. Now,...
Redesigning People: How far will you go?
My friend David Ewing Duncan recently published an fascinating piece in the Atlantic.com online site examining what’s ahead in medical technologies. What’s clear is that medtech and biotech are moving beyond the traditional boundaries of dire medical need and into the realm of human enhancement. There’s a fine line between exoskeletons to help a paralyzed...
Buildings that grow, breathe, and self-repair?
As springtime approaches, so do the home repairs – painting the trim or deck, replacing the rotted boards, getting the lawnmower blade sharpened. But what if our buildings were more like life? What if they grew from a seed? Or were heated with solar energy or sugars or oils they manufactured themselves? What if they...
Happy Yogurt
I just came across this video (see below) by Tuur van Balen, a self-described Freelance Designer Researcher, who talks about hacking yogurt to produce the antidepressant Prozac. van Balen brilliantly combines fact (synthetic biology, lab techniques, biobricks) with fiction (to my knowledge, biosynthesis of Prozac, or flouxetine, a chemical hasn’t been demonstrated) to produce a...
Synthetic biology: Key Field for the Future?
The ever-brilliant and super-connected Melanie Swan, hedge fund manager and co-founder of DIYGenomics, has posted a thoughtful, well-referenced short article looking at how synthetic biology could have a significant future impact on many industrial sectors. Full article at IEET.
JBEI Develops CAD-Type Tools for RNA
The computer assisted design (CAD) tools that made it possible to fabricate integrated circuits with millions of transistors may soon be coming to the biological sciences. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have developed CAD-type models and simulations for RNA molecules that make it possible to engineer biological components...
Researchers hope to make living computers
Ongoing research work aims to build simple computers that operate inside living cells, teaching them how to grow and divide using methods similar to programming a computer to operate functions over time. The work is being done by Stanford-based synthetic biologist, Dr. Drew Endy. Endy has worked to establish biology as an engineering discipline, allowing...
