Goetz: Just to touch on the ethics of this, why do you think it strikes a nerve in people that you’re doing this with life, with organisms, compared to the tinkering and manipulation that’s being done with, say, silicon? What is it about biology that is different?
Venter: I think because we’re a part of biology and we relate to that. But the amount of fear this arouses depends on our education, it depends on people’s religion. You see it in literature, the idea that “if you alter life forms it’s going to lead to no good end.” That goes back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and you see it in movies—it’s part of our culture. Perhaps it’s an innate fear because we’re a part of biology, so we’re afraid of making things better or making them worse. But I think it’s the most powerful technology we have at our disposal to change the outcome of humanity.
There’s only one Craig Venter, that may or may not be a good thing.
Read the interview at Wired.
"Wilson’s blanket dismissal of kin selection ignores decades worth of research. Instead of grappling with this research, Wilson slashes at his unnamed, unspecific critics, which includes “most social scientists” and “most people, including many scholars.” And what do these straw men want? According to Wilson, they seek to deny “the very existence of human nature,” or, at the very least, “keep human nature at least partly in the dark.” If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is."
"Biology has always been controlled in science by who had the DNA, who had the cells, who had the species. Now it’s all digital. Most labs, instead of getting the DNA from another lab, download it digitally, and synthetically make the genes."
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Craig Venter, CEO of Synthetic Genomics. From Downloadable Gun Parts, Personalized Bioterror: the Downside of Innovation [PBS]
From the same interview, Craig Venter adds,
While I think it’s very cool at one hand we have all this bio-hacking going on, I think it could also be the most dangerous trend. You don’t want your kids to be the first one on the block to make Ebola virus.
The future portrayed by particular fields of science often seems incredible, inspiring and breathtaking. It’s also true that it seems odd, scary and worthy of significant criticism. The rest of the 10 minute special comes across as Y2K type of paranoia but if you’re a fan, knock yourself out at the link.
From PBS Newshour's Downloadable Gun Parts, Personalized Bioterror: the Downside of Innovation
PAUL SOLMAN: Moreover, computers are becoming increasingly embedded in the hardware around us. The typical new car, says Goodman, has 250 computer chips. And in this Google prototype now legally riding the roads of Nevada, even the driving is fully computerized.
MARC GOODMAN: So, you could put in bad GPS directions and have a car drive off a bridge. Every day, we're plugging more and more of our lives into the Internet, including bridges, tunnels, financial systems, hospitals, police emergency dispatch 911 systems, military systems, robotics systems. And there's a history of all of these being hacked.
PAUL SOLMAN: The Stuxnet computer worm that disabled Iran's nuclear program made headlines, but smaller targets are also vulnerable.
MARC GOODMAN: Diabetic pumps, cochlear implants, brain computer interface. There are 60,000 pacemakers in the United States that connect to the Internet, which means that the Internet connects to your pacemaker. It's great when you're suffering from an arrhythmia and your doctor can remotely shock you, but what happens if the kid next door does that because it's fun and does it for the lulz.
PAUL SOLMAN: You mean LOL, laughing out loud?
Great work from the Boston Open Source Science Lab (bosslab),
pVIB transformants from BIOTECH 101. 30 second exposure, iso 100, minimum aperture (aperture as big as it can be) with a brief flash of light at the beginning. This develops the scene around the plate, and then the rest of the blue glowing color develops from the long exposure.
The pVIB plasmid contains a luciferase gene (information here) which are enzymes that emit light. This is very cool, great job.
Also related: How Bio-luminescence Works [How Stuff Works]
Object Type: Manuscript
Title: An Introduction to Genetics
Maker: A. H. Sturtevant
Date: 1939
Medium: printed book w/colored plates
Dimensions: 8 x 5 3/4 x 1 3/8; x 10 3/4 open; w/ fold-out leaf x 16 3/4 wide
Significance: Laboratory confirmation of mechanisms of inheritance: genetics
Source: Flickr
Continued from yesterday
“I decided to take what we understand in computing and apply that to programming biology. To me, that’s really the essence of synthetic biology.” - Ron Weiss
At 3 am I finished watching Playing God, BBC 2’s Horizon episode on synthetic biology. If you don’t have an hour to spare but you’re still interested in the contents of the video, Andrew Rutherford provides a summary in this article over at The Guardian. It’s all fun and games and then you realize that the field is consistently moving,
Scientists have long since managed to reconstruct the proteins in the silk, using everything from bacteria to potatoes to goats. But these systems only provided small amounts of silk proteins, and would be expensive to scale up. Making silk proteins is just part of the far harder challenge of turning proteins into silk fibres, with their complex microscopic structures. To get around these problems, Donald Jarvis, Malcolm Fraser and Randolph Lewis had a simple idea: why not use another animal that also spins silk?
From Not Exactly Rocket Science [Discovery Blogs]
![Great work from the Boston Open Source Science Lab (bosslab),
pVIB transformants from BIOTECH 101. 30 second exposure, iso 100, minimum aperture (aperture as big as it can be) with a brief flash of light at the beginning. This develops the scene around the plate, and then the rest of the blue glowing color develops from the long exposure.
The pVIB plasmid contains a luciferase gene (information here) which are enzymes that emit light. This is very cool, great job.
Also related: How Bio-luminescence Works [How Stuff Works]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m412tr0OGn1qaoxg6o1_1280.jpg)
