Notes, thoughts, and news on synthetic biology.
In some labs, biology and computer science are converging. On the one hand, computer scientists are working towards creating computer chips inspired by the circuitry of the brain, and on the other, some synthetic biologists are aiming to create biological computers inside living cells...
David Chang of Momofuku gives an awesome talk about microbiology and food for Harvard's Science and Cooking seminars, with a special cameo by my very good friend Ben Wolfe, mycologist/botanist/microbiologist/cheese expert extraordinaire...
As usual, these past few weeks (ok, years) my head has been full of swirling thoughts of symbiosis, synthetic biology, photosynthesis, and biomimicry.
A terrific talk by artist and designer Daisy Ginsberg on synthetic biology, design, and synthetic aesthetics at PopTech:
Keeping up with the news of synthetic biology means I often see a lot of kooky things. There's the delightfully kooky iGEM project ideas or news of cyborg yeast (more on that hopefully sometime soon), a few conspiracy theory websites, and lots of newspaper articles with headlines like (I'm paraphrasing here) "Synthetic Biology Will Soon Kill Us All" or "Every Problem in the Entire World to be Solved by Synthetic Biology in the Next Decade." This oscillation between certain death and techno-utopia is what Drew Endy calls "The Half-pipe of Doom," the inescapable binary of equally implausible hype surrounding the field...
I had the pleasure of chatting with Maggie Koerth-Baker again for Bloggingheads Science Saturday, this time talking about the future of energy, how biotechnology might play a role in that future, and the risks involved in new technologies as well as the risks of sticking to old ones...
The recent Nature paper from Jef Boeke's group, "Synthetic chromosome arms function in yeast and generate phenotypic diversity by design," begins with an appropriately futuristic sentence: "The first phase of any genome engineering project is design." While there have been efforts to redesign viral genomes and chemically synthesize bacterial genomes, whole genomes of living cells are not yet something that can readily be designed from scratch...
We can see millions of variations in color but we split up the rainbow into just six main colors when trying to describe what we see--red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.
Bacteria can swim and swarm, and left to their own devices on nutritious petri dishes some species will form remarkable patterns. I stumbled on such a pattern-forming species when trying to isolate bacteria from skin and cheese, a stinky swarming strain that would cover my plates in rippling waves of cells...
I'm late to posting this, but if you haven't seen it already here is the video of my chat with Maggie Koerth-Baker from BoingBoing for Bloggingheads Science Saturday.
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