Synthetic Life
cevans | June 3, 2010
What do these three quotations have in common? Hint: it lives in a petri dish.
"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life." -- James Joyce
"What I cannot build, I cannot understand." -- Richard Feynman
"See things not as they are, but as they might be." -- from American Prometheus, a biography of the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer
Although James Joyce could never have imagined it, his words -- and those of Feynman and Oppenheimer, too -- are no longer relegated to library stacks, but instead live on inside an unlikely host: the world's first synthetic…
cagapakis | April 17, 2010New in vitro fertilization technology is making it possible for someone to have two moms--one that provides the genome in the nucleus of the cell, and one that provides the rest of the egg cell, including the mitochondria. Since all mitochondria are passed down from the mother in the egg (sperm are just too small to provide anything but the father's genetic material to the fertilized embryo), transplanting the nucleus from a fertilized embryo to an egg from a different woman can bypass the transmission of any mitochondrial diseases that the mother carries. Because mitochondria have their own…
razib | March 11, 2010I remember Craig Venter talking about synthetic life in the fall of 2007 with Carl Zimmer. Last summer he said that we'd have the first "synthetic species" by the end of the year. I haven't heard about it in 2010, have you? Anyone have info on what's going on here? No surprise that project deadlines get pushed back, it happens. But it seems like I've been hearing "wait 6 months" since the beginning of 2008. Does it actually work out so that only God can pull this off? Or is this vaporscience (OK, he got the genome part nailed down, but that was a while ago)?