Bill Joy’s grey goo is nonsense. This field will be the source of the rebirth of invention.

What I feel has been left out of the whole “Synthetic Biology” craze is the long, long history of bioengineering and breeding experiments. Even on a DNA level, Venter used known building blocks and stitched them together to “create” his cell — if a new function is needed the best methods for creating it are almost always copying or speeding up evolutionary processes in some way: artificial selection, the same thing that brought us cows, dogs, corn, and roses. That this selection occurs now at the level of molecules using complex technological systems like phage display instead of on the level of organisms doesn’t make it a new process – it means we have tools to speed up and fine-tune the old process. What will be truly impressive in Synthetic Biology would be creating, a priori and without homology-based methods, a functional protein that performs a novel task. It might not sound as cool as “Creating Synthetic Organisms” but it is much more novel, in my opinion.

Geez, you kids today. Probably never heard of William Henry Pratt, eh? Stage name, Boris Karloff. Worked with Dr. Suess.

Honestly though Gene did it better than Vincent…

…at least until someone with deep pockets and a lobbyist figures out a business model based on creating life-forms.

Besides, this is IP, not patents! IP just needs to be created to be secured. Well, and lawyer’d to be defended. ;)

Hmmm….maybe the USDMCA can prevent us from breaking the locks put on our DNA by the companies we work for (after signing contracts that specify that all things we create while employed by the company are owned by the company).

“Only pirates have babies! Making a human is theft. You are depriving Sony of employees and market share! You wouldn’t steal a car, so don’t pirate genetic material!”

As several folks have commented, Venter can only make a meaningful claim to synthesizing life de novo if he can generate a cell (or other life form) from first principles. This stunt isn’t “making life,” but merely another technical exploit in copying life. That isn’t to say it’s bad or unimportant work, but it’s not nearly as important (and certainly not as creative) as Craig wants the world to believe.

And to emphasize another set of previous comments, human-made superbugs aren’t going to come eat your babies. Mother nature has been hard at work making superbugs long before we got and the scene, and will continue to do so long afterwards. We’re simply not as important to the microbial world as we like to imagine.

Let’s Get ready to Rummmmble!!!

That’s eerily close to a sound bite from the intro to a horror movie. An effective and creepy sound bite.

But I’m excited nonetheless, this is awesome stuff.

Turns out it was real. Now I’m totally creeped out.

This is pretty amazing. The question is: can he take ANY viable code and stick it into a cell, and have the cell accept it?

No. As important as DNA is, it only defines what the cell can produce, and its structure also plays an important role. As an obvious example, bacteria only have one main chromosome, and without a nucleus it would be hard to keep track of more. Nuclei aren’t formed from scratch, so you need to start off with one.

Apparently sometimes even having the right kind of cell isn’t enough. For instance, a fly egg knows which end should become the head based on a protein the mother puts there. Without it, the embryo won’t end up differentiating properly.

Living things are subtle, and aren’t purely digital. Being able to swap DNA at all is fairly impressive to my thinking.

Yeah, they didn’t give humans gills or anything, but they certainly showed a technique that might one day be used to screw with the genetic code of says mommy’s egg and daddy’s sperm. Imagine if they could store the genetic code in an egg, cut out say a few cancer inducing genes, synthesize a new sequence and shoot it back into the egg. You get a kid with no cancer gene. You don’t need to think too long or hard about all the scary and awesome things that could be done with such tech.

So, they have not done anything other than prove out a technique, but the technique has some horrifically awesome power. It certainly should be causing people to ponder how we want to deal with the ethics of screwing with our own genetic code.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8GRQHsAVjI