
Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering - timr
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14Biology-t.html?hp
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RobKohr
Ok, too much fluff and too much text. Anyone want to do a geeky 2 paragraph
summary of the information contained in this article.

What are people doing and how? How might someone do whatever it is that is
being done? Is there anything valuable or interesting here?

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JunkDNA
At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I don't get what differentiates the
(new) "synthetic biology" from the (old) "genetic engineering". They seem like
the exact same thing to me (I'm open to be convinced otherwise though). The
only difference I can find is that one term has been pilloried by the green
movement, while the other has (for reasons not quite clear to me) escaped most
of that negative attention.

People have been talking about all of these genetic engineering fantasies for
my entire lifetime. The technology is still not there to put all the pieces
together "like Legos" as the arcticle seems to suggest. I am happy to see that
this stuff is getting people interested in science, and biology in particular.
But this article makes it sound like you could just go order a bunch of DNA
and make yourself a little bacterium that does whatever you want. We're still
a bit far from those days.

~~~
timr
Synthetic biology is a subtype of genetic engineering where the focus is on
building up a set of modular parts that can be used to assemble "living
machines" with (relatively) minimal effort. Think "Lego Mindstorms" for
bacteria.

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rbxbx
Good related talk from Future Ruby

<http://www.infoq.com/interviews/che-synthetic-biology>

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coryl
God schmod, I want my monkey man!

