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Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology by Christina Agapakis.
June 22, 2010
Category: synthetic biology
There's a terrific new article about synthetic biology in SEED by James King, go check it out! Here's a little taste: "Synthetic biology" is a catch-all label liberally applied to a host of methods for designing and constructing living things....
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 9:52 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2010
Category: iGEM
The first (and sometimes 3rd, 12th, 25th, 134th...) step of any genetic engineering experiment is often extracting DNA from some organism or another. While novel gene synthesis technology will likely make this procedure obsolete, these days it's still most economical...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 5:15 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 13, 2010
Category: iGEM
iGEM officially starts for the Harvard team tomorrow for some good old-fashioned fun with BioBricks, arabidopsis, protein-based sweeteners, and shRNA! Our goal is to make a system for genetically engineering plants safely and easily with some hopefully fun and useful...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 4:12 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 10, 2010
Category: gender
In the recent articles, blog posts, and comment threads about possible biological reasons for the continued gender disparity in tenured math and science faculty positions, the discussion seems to be divided between two groups: those who emphasize the social and...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:35 AM • 44 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2010
Category: culture
Another day, another article about how women are biologically inferior to men when it comes to high-level math and science. The fact that this one comes from the New York Times Science section, a newspaper I typically respect very highly,...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 2:28 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: bacteria
In a recent conversation about the safety and ethics of synthetic biology in the wake of the announcement of the synthetic genome, many of the professors I was chatting with commented on how they hoped new synthetic biology technology...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:27 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 6, 2010
Category: silk
Silk is an amazing biomaterial, cultivated and prized for more than 5,000 years. The silk threads that we weave into our shiny fabrics are actually enormous protein crystals produced by insects. This industrial silk that you can buy at the...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 8:38 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 2, 2010
Category: education
The World Science Festival starts today in New York City with tons of exciting events from BioArt to The Science of Star Trek and all sorts of great stuff in between! If you can't make it to New York there's...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 11:37 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: biosafety
Biosafety has been on everyone's mind this week after the announcement of the J. Craig Venter Institute's successful transplantation of a synthetic genome. What horrible pathogen will future bioengineers be able to design? What unforeseeable environmental catastrophe will befall us...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 10:52 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 1, 2010
Category: religion
I'm realizing that perhaps in yesterday's post I took everyone's love and understanding of postmodern feminist theory for granted so I'm going to start a little series of posts that I think will slowly introduce some of the issues that...
Posted by Christina Agapakis at 1:58 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
