Errrr, here at the University of Texas at Austin PhD candidates in biomedical engineering are guaranteed $30k/year with more possible via fellowships. It is not uncommon to reach $40-50k/year.
Assistant profs in engineering make around $100k/year. Our department chair owns a ranch where he keeps his bulldozer, firetruck, and related toys.
I'm not disagreeing that the vast majority of professors are not well paid, but the numbers you cite sound more like what I'd expect from a liberal arts college, not a respected engineering department. They certainly do not jive with my experience.
A 6 mJ pulse lasting 10 ns is insanely powerful (power, ha, get it?) The instantaneous power rating would be in the MW range, even though the total energy delivered is not large.
Pulsed lasers are by far the most dangerous to work with, especially when it comes to protecting vision. A continuous wave laser gives you time to blink or avert your eye while a pulsed laser does it's damage instantly without giving your reflexes time to work. One 10 ns pulse was enough to permanently damage vision.
There you'd be wrong. The patent lists 5 sets of genes. The patent specifically describes an organism comprised of no more than 450 genes with a certain number of genes from each set; some genes are interchangeable, some are not. If you cared to you could read through, pick out a subset of genes from the provided list, and come up with a DNA sequence.
Then, if you were so inclined, you would call up some company or the DNA synthesizing facility at your local university and give them the sequence. They would, for some many thousands of dollars, synthesize the desired sequence. You could then take an e. coli, remove its genetic material, insert your synthetic sequence, and voila! Synthetic life. The extraneous (natural?) cellular machinery would slowly degrade, and without the original DNA around it would not be replaced. After a generation or two there would be only the synthetic mix of proteins remaining.
Patents seem essential for capitalism, perhaps in a more communist/socialist state where all research was government funded there would be less need for IP.
I'm a GRA in a biomedical lab and took a course once on bioengineering, the topic of the patent.
As mentioned previously they're not patenting synthetic life but a specific minimal set of genes required to produce a replicating bacterium. There was a non-trivial amount of work that went into researching these genes and determining the least combinations necessary for replication in a solution that provides all the basic building blocks (ie. this bacteria will not be synthesizing its own amino acids, I would imagine).
This is could be important for industrial biosynthetic applications. Every protein expressed by a bacteria increases its metabolic load and decreases the efficiency with which it can convert input (sugars, amino acids, nucleotides) into the desired output (insulin, drugs, other useful biocompounds). By determining the minimum necessary set of genes for replication a ground-state bacteria has been designed that can be used as the starting point for designing more efficient expression systems.
It also allows these expression systems to be more fully characterized which can help when attempting to determine and modulate the effect metabolic load and evolution will have on a vat of bacteria as it progresses from generation to generation. One problem with these systems is that synthesizing extra compounds increases the metabolic and decreases the replication rate. If it is possible for the bacteria to mutate and stop expression of the product their metabolic load decreases and they begin to replicate faster; this causes vats of bacteria to tend to evolve such that they stop producing the useful compound. There are ways to get around this (such as turning production on and off using external chemical signals, tying production to survival, etc.) that might be optimized in such a minimal system. Engineering life is tricky because of the extremely high number of potential interactions to be analyzed for every new configuration; it is more difficult because many of these interactions can't be calculated or simulated.
This patent won't be all that useful for more complex human proteins as these require an array of post-translational modification proteins that change the product after the initial synthesis; thus they require a correspondingly complex expression system derived from a yeast cell or an animal cell (I think some worms have been used to develop complex expression systems); Alternately bacteria can be modified to produce the modification proteins. These expression systems have doubtless already been patented or are no longer patentable, so this new patent probably won't be very useful until it is bundled with a set of associated patents for efficient expression systems for various compounds.
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Errrr, here at the University of Texas at Austin PhD candidates in biomedical engineering are guaranteed $30k/year with more possible via fellowships. It is not uncommon to reach $40-50k/year.
Assistant profs in engineering make around $100k/year. Our department chair owns a ranch where he keeps his bulldozer, firetruck, and related toys.
I'm not disagreeing that the vast majority of professors are not well paid, but the numbers you cite sound more like what I'd expect from a liberal arts college, not a respected engineering department. They certainly do not jive with my experience.
A 6 mJ pulse lasting 10 ns is insanely powerful (power, ha, get it?) The instantaneous power rating would be in the MW range, even though the total energy delivered is not large. Pulsed lasers are by far the most dangerous to work with, especially when it comes to protecting vision. A continuous wave laser gives you time to blink or avert your eye while a pulsed laser does it's damage instantly without giving your reflexes time to work. One 10 ns pulse was enough to permanently damage vision.
There you'd be wrong. The patent lists 5 sets of genes. The patent specifically describes an organism comprised of no more than 450 genes with a certain number of genes from each set; some genes are interchangeable, some are not. If you cared to you could read through, pick out a subset of genes from the provided list, and come up with a DNA sequence.
Then, if you were so inclined, you would call up some company or the DNA synthesizing facility at your local university and give them the sequence. They would, for some many thousands of dollars, synthesize the desired sequence. You could then take an e. coli, remove its genetic material, insert your synthetic sequence, and voila! Synthetic life. The extraneous (natural?) cellular machinery would slowly degrade, and without the original DNA around it would not be replaced. After a generation or two there would be only the synthetic mix of proteins remaining.
Patents seem essential for capitalism, perhaps in a more communist/socialist state where all research was government funded there would be less need for IP.
I'm a GRA in a biomedical lab and took a course once on bioengineering, the topic of the patent.
As mentioned previously they're not patenting synthetic life but a specific minimal set of genes required to produce a replicating bacterium. There was a non-trivial amount of work that went into researching these genes and determining the least combinations necessary for replication in a solution that provides all the basic building blocks (ie. this bacteria will not be synthesizing its own amino acids, I would imagine).
This is could be important for industrial biosynthetic applications. Every protein expressed by a bacteria increases its metabolic load and decreases the efficiency with which it can convert input (sugars, amino acids, nucleotides) into the desired output (insulin, drugs, other useful biocompounds). By determining the minimum necessary set of genes for replication a ground-state bacteria has been designed that can be used as the starting point for designing more efficient expression systems.
It also allows these expression systems to be more fully characterized which can help when attempting to determine and modulate the effect metabolic load and evolution will have on a vat of bacteria as it progresses from generation to generation. One problem with these systems is that synthesizing extra compounds increases the metabolic and decreases the replication rate. If it is possible for the bacteria to mutate and stop expression of the product their metabolic load decreases and they begin to replicate faster; this causes vats of bacteria to tend to evolve such that they stop producing the useful compound. There are ways to get around this (such as turning production on and off using external chemical signals, tying production to survival, etc.) that might be optimized in such a minimal system. Engineering life is tricky because of the extremely high number of potential interactions to be analyzed for every new configuration; it is more difficult because many of these interactions can't be calculated or simulated.
This patent won't be all that useful for more complex human proteins as these require an array of post-translational modification proteins that change the product after the initial synthesis; thus they require a correspondingly complex expression system derived from a yeast cell or an animal cell (I think some worms have been used to develop complex expression systems); Alternately bacteria can be modified to produce the modification proteins. These expression systems have doubtless already been patented or are no longer patentable, so this new patent probably won't be very useful until it is bundled with a set of associated patents for efficient expression systems for various compounds.