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POPSAlife, i.e. artificial life ahead "Just as 19th-century engineers studied the flight of birds and dreamed of being airborne, he says, so today's computer engineers marvel at the intelligence in all forms of life and contemplate the potential of more efficient computation." It may be sooner that expected, are we ready for it? does it matter? I think it does. I think we as a human society much put more effort in thinking the future ahead of us.
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POPSThe Genetic Early Adopters Knome is at the forefront of the push toward so-called personalized medicine. Scientists and physicians hope that when sequencing costs come down enough, genetic analysis will become a ubiquitous part of health care, helping doctors choose the best treatments for a specific patient, or helping individuals take steps to prevent diseases for which they are at risk.
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POPSNew research shows diet and exercise may change how genes act "These genes are the target of many new drugs that are being developed. Clearly, changing lifestyle is less expensive, and the only side-effects are good ones. Dr. Craig Venter’s pioneering research is showing that one way to change your genes is to synthesize new ones. Another may be to change your lifestyle." This research have a very small sample size so it doesn't prove much but I found it very interesting.
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POPSNewsweek Interview: Craig Venter's CO2-Eating Miracle Bacterium "Venter hopes his bugs will supplant the need for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies by making CO2 a commodity, instead of a byproduct to be disposed of. According to Venter, large, bacteria-processing fermenters, similar to those used to make beer and wine, would replace traditional refineries. He expects the first generation of his engineered bacteria to be commercially available within the next year or two years. He made it a point to stress that he and his colleagues were thinking "in terms of years, not decades."
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POPSTree of Synthetic Life creating a new tree of life for artificial biology---there are now four classifications of life: Natural Biological, Genetically-Engineered Biological, Synthetic Biological, and Synthetic Nonbiological
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POPSFamed Geneticist Creating Life Form That Turns CO2 to Fuel Scientists put "suicide genes" into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves. Venter said he is also working on organisms that make vaccines for the flu and other illnesses. Suicide genes and vaccines mentioned in the same breath, sort of creeps me out a little. :roll:
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POPSFuel from CO2 Geneticist Craig Venter is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.
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POPSThirty years into biotechnology Fascinating what Bio-techs are going to be doing soon...engineering the Human Race...see the site for the video of this young genius and what he wants to do...
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POPSArtificial Life On The Horizon?! From the Wiki entry for "AI: Artificial Intelligence": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._(movie) "The story is set at an unspecified date in the future. Global warming has led to an ecological disaster resulting in a drastic reduction of the human population and rising sea levels. Cities like New York City and Venice lie in ruins. Mankind’s efforts to maintain civilization lead to the creation of android artificial intelligence." Strangely and powerfully prescient.
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POPSGenetics Revolution Continues DAWKINS: It’s more than just saying you can pick up a chromosome and put it in somewhere else. It is pure information. You could put it into a printed book. You could send it over the Internet. You could store it on a magnetic disk for a thousand years, and then in a thousand years’ time, with the technology that they’ll have then, it would be possible to reconstruct whatever living organism was here now. What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information; it’s digital information; it’s precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit-for-digit, byte-for-byte into any other kind of information.
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POPSSynthetic life - a step nearer Moreover, Dr. Venter’s team, led by a Nobel laureate, Hamilton O. Smith, has yet to accomplish the next — and biggest — step. That would be to insert the synthetic chromosome into a living microbe and have it “boot up” and take control of the organism’s functions. If that happened, it would be considered by some to be the creation of the first synthetic organism. The failure to achieve that tempered the reaction of some outside scientists to the announced achievement. “Right now, all they’ve done is shown they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together,” said George M. Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Venter’s team last year reported successfully doing such a chromosome transplant, but it was with the natural genome of one type of Mycoplasma transplanted into another species of that bacterium. (NYT)
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POPSGene map for synthetic life created in lab The Bacterium, M. genitalium has the smallest known genome of any truly living organism, with 485 working genes all in one chromosome. Viruses are smaller, but they cannot replicate by themselves. Dr Craig Ventner is described as a celebrity scientist. Struck me as an unusual way to describe a scientist.
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POPSNew Life! New life? Well not exactly the animal-human hybrids Bush paraded forth in his last State of the Union. Yet this, if proven viable and true is a significant development. Rudimentary yet interesting.
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