SAN FRANCISCO - The notorious E. coli bug made its film debut Wednesday. That's when researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas announced in the journal Nature that they had created photographs of themselves by programming the bacteria — best known for outbreaks of food poisoning — to make pictures in much the same way Kodak film produces images....
Scientists in Israel made the world's smallest computer by engineering DNA to carry out mathematical functions.
_J. Craig Venter, the entrepreneurial scientist who mapped the human genome and launched the Rockville, Md.-based research institute named after himself, is attempting to create novel organisms that can produce alternative fuels.
_With a $42.6 million grant that originated at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Berkeley researchers are engineering the E. coli bug with genes from the wormwood plant and yeast to create a new malaria drug.
Even as they wrestle with scientific hurdles like controlling genetic mutations, thorny ethical issues are cropping up.
It's cheap and easy to buy individual genes online. They cost about $1 each, down from the $18 apiece charged just a few years ago. Researchers last year created a synthetic polio virus by simply stitching together these mail-order genes.
National security experts and even synthetic biologists themselves are concerned that rogue scientists could create new biological weapons — like deadly viruses that lack natural foes. They also worry about innocent mistakes: organisms that could potentially create havoc if allowed to reproduce outside the lab.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment