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Startup Offers Pre-Built Biological Parts
TechReviewAl writes "A new startup called Ginkgo BioWorks hopes to make synthetic-biology simpler than ever by assembling biological parts, such as strings of specific genes, for industry and academic scientists. While companies already exist to synthesize pieces of DNA, Ginkgo assembles synthesized pieces of DNA to create functional genetic pathways. (Assembling specific genes into long pieces of DNA is much cheaper than synthesizing that long piece from scratch.) Company cofounder Tom Knight, also a research scientist at MIT, says: 'I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.'"
kinda like this,
"Scientists create synthetic polio virus from genetic sequence"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm
Several articles on this back in 2002.
It's called "bio bricks", and it's old news.
I read about before 2006.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Wow. Retarded reply gets modded up to the highest post.. I'd be surprised, but hey, it's a non-IT article on Slashdot.
How would you feel if I told you that teenagers have been using biobricks to do some of this "pipe dream" stuff for about 10 years now. That there's an annual international competition to showcase what they come up with and that has been running since 2003? That biobricks are a standard part of genetic engineering of microbes for industrial use? That basically everything you said was so horrendously outdated and ignorant that you sound like someone talking about the impossibility of heavier than air flight in 1913.
I know things have been bad around here for a long time and we've all come to just accept it, but would it be too much to ask that the moderation system undergo a little bit of review? I'm gunna ask the Taco.
How we know is more important than what we know.