Hacking With Synthetic Biology

blackbearnh writes "If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She talked to O'Reilly Radar recently about the benefits and potential dangers of easy biological design, why students should be hacking wetware, and what's involved in setting up your own lab to slice genes."

Comments

Re:Doesn't this sound like...

[zappepcs]

Are you kidding? This will revolutionize the world. Your neighbor (not mine), in an attempt to show that you can't even FORCE nature to make a crocoduck will inadvertently create an airborne strain of E. coli that is resistant to any cheap form of treatment: resulting in a solution to rising unemployment and illegal immigration in less than 38 hours. The resulting global changes will be heralded as Allah's revenge against the great satan and simultaneously on the GLBT communities for their crimes against god. In less than a week, big pharmaceutical industry will collapse with the announcement that a 15 year old Korean kid in S.California has created an antidote that can be distributed in the flavor coating on potato chips. Frito Lay purchases several Pharma companies and hires the kid to work on gene therapies to be distributed via Corn Chips. Monsanto sues to block genetically modified material being added to their corn........ sigh