{"id":4852,"date":"2010-05-20T14:16:16","date_gmt":"2010-05-20T21:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=4852"},"modified":"2010-05-20T14:16:16","modified_gmt":"2010-05-20T21:16:16","slug":"bespoke-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/20\/bespoke-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Bespoke Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2010\/05\/capt.f36384a3dfe8468ca4a55741f2b91104-f36384a3dfe8468ca4a55741f2b91104-0.jpg\" alt=\"Synthetic Cell\" width=\"266\" height=\"344\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4853\" \/> Craig Venter and colleagues have achieved a remarkable milestone:  they <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20100520\/ap_on_sc\/us_sci_synthetic_cell\">designed a genome, and brought it to life<\/a>.  More specifically, they&#8217;ve synthesized a chromosome consisting of over a million DNA base pairs, and implanted it in a bacterial cell to replace the cell&#8217;s original genome.  That cell then reproduced, giving birth to offspring that only had the synthetic genome.  See the Venter Institute <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jcvi.org\/cms\/press\/press-releases\/full-text\/article\/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell-constructed-by-j-craig-venter-institute-researcher\/\">press release<\/a>, discussion in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/bit.ly\/dfxvN7\">Nature<\/a><\/em> (pdf), more discussion at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge.org\/documents\/archive\/edge318.html#a\"><em>Edge<\/em><\/a>, and some <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/loom\/2010\/05\/20\/synthetic-genome-natural-cell-new-life\/\">background from Carl Zimmer<\/a>.  <strong>Update<\/strong>:  and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/cgi\/content\/abstract\/science.1190719\">here is the paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Who knows exactly what this means as yet &#8212; but it&#8217;s important!  You can argue if you like about whether it&#8217;s really &#8220;artificial life&#8221; &#8212; that argument has already started, and already seems boring.  There are also speculations about designing microorganisms to help us solve problems like global warming or (let&#8217;s say) massive oil spills.  Not completely crazy speculations, either.  But there&#8217;s a long way to go before anything like that is coming off a biological assembly line.  And eventually we&#8217;ll be going much further than that, beyond designer microorganisms into much weirder terrain.  This isn&#8217;t a culmination, it&#8217;s just a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Craig Venter and colleagues have achieved a remarkable milestone: they designed a genome, and brought it to life. More specifically, they&#8217;ve synthesized a chromosome consisting of over a million DNA base pairs, and implanted it in a bacterial cell to replace the cell&#8217;s original genome. That cell then reproduced, giving birth to offspring that only [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}