People in the synthetic biology world have been talking about this idea for several years — encoding data for storage in living cells. Biological computing. Science Blog reports on a recent success by Drew Endy’s group at Stanford in creating a bit of rewritable memory in a living cell. His goal is to go from […]
DARPA has aleady been investing selectively in academic synthetic biology projects. This is a big new investment that should give a boost to research across the field. Science Insider reports that the first phase of the Living Foundries efforts “will support work that advances the tools needed to make synthetic biology more efficient and cheaper” […]
Craig Venter discusses biological tool kits for future space exploration and more in this recent talk at NASA Ames Center. Update: Previous link was changed to password-protected. This video works for now, though is not as good quality.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Another interesting iGem event this year, which will be the last super-sized jamboree held at MIT. Starting next year, iGem director Randy Rettberg announced during his introductory remarks, iGem will consist of several regional events, with winners going on to compete in a smaller final event in Cambridge. Charlie Schick and I spoke with Randy […]
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Says Andrew Pollock in the New York Times. Regarding his biofuel efforts, the killer quote, I think comes from Jay Keasling: “I don’t know how many decades his funders have given him.” George Church, as he has repeatedly in the past, questions the wisdom and practicality of engineering organisms from scratch rather than simply re-engineering […]
Andrew Pollack had a long piece in the New York Times yesterday on the race to develop a viable process for making fuel from algae. The article focuses on Sapphire Energy, which has raised $100 million from investors including Bill Gates and is getting another $100 million in federal financing to build a demo project […]
New visual musings on synthetic life from artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg. Below, the “3-D Table Matrix,” one of several classification systems Ginsburg proposes.
In a recent Inc. magazine story, I wrote about the Tech Shop and La Cocina, a kitchen incubator in San Francisco, as examples of physical spaces whose shared tools and resources are making possible a new wave of innovation and, with it, entrepreneurial activity. In my research I came across information on another project that […]
James King, a designer/artist with a scientific bent, has a good article in Seed magazine on the various “flavors” of synthetic biology — a great, accessible introduction to what’s happening right now. Nice work! Below is video James made for his “Cellularity” project, exploring the scientific notion of “aliveness.” Cellularity from James King on Vimeo.
Jason Bobe, one of the “founders” of the DIYBio movement and director of community for the George Church-led Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, recently gave a talk as part of a forum on biosecurity at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Bobe’s slides, which can be downloaded here, neatly describe the current scope of (known) […]