there’s alot of buzz right now around craig venter, since him and his sizeable team managed to produce a (basically) synthetic life form. It’s not synthetic in the way that it has silicon parts or anything, it’s synthetic in the sense that they built it from the ground up, using what evolution has already provided to make cellular life form on earth.

even using the simplest bacteria they could, it took years to do this project. the reason i got hired at blue heron bio in the first place was because they accepted a gene building project for this, and they just needed temp work to handle the huge volume. now, we’ve been cited in the scientific publication, which is almost akin to being cited in the human genome paper (also spearheaded by Venter). it’s exciting for the company to get some good publicity like this, especially in this economic climate. go blue heron!

seeing this synthetic building of a life form finally work out is really exciting though. this synthetic bacteria is basically a nanomachine. venter’s group stripped down this bacteria, isolated every single gene, and then built it all back up, seeing which genes were necessary to keep it alive, and finding all sorts of interconnections between genes and gene expression. now that the base form is there, and with a little tweaking, almost any other gene can be added. make some biofuel, make some drugs, whatever gene you can coax it into expressing without dying. eventually you get these things sophisticated enough that they can be in your bloodstream, regulating your blood sugar for you if you’re diabetic.  eating up excessive cholesterol, and cleaning your circulatory system. this is all years off though, lots of FDA testing before this starts happening, but these are nanomachines.

robots we built off of an organic scaffolding, and we can program them to do what we want. nanomachines! science marches on.