Cool and/or Scary
May 21st, 2010
2 comments
They’ve created the first living organism with completely synthetic DNA. They didn’t build the whole cell, though, they did a transplant. Still, wow. And, unnerving. You wonder when they are going to use this to (a) cure cancer and (b) create a virus that will kill every last human being.
This part is a bit spooky:
Dr Venter told BBC News: “We’ve now been able to take our synthetic chromosome and transplant it into a recipient cell – a different organism.
”As soon as this new software goes into the cell, the cell reads [it] and converts into the species specified in that genetic code.“
Software. And the cell is hardware, which reads the program and executes it. Hrmm.
Categories: Science