Synthetic Life Biologists are crafting libraries of
interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside
microbes to create programmable, living machines By W.
Wayt Gibbs
Evolution is a wellspring of creativity; 3.6 billion years
of mutation and competition have endowed living things with
an impressive range of useful skills. But there is still
plenty of room for improvement. Certain microbes can digest
the explosive and carcinogenic chemical TNT, for example--
but wouldn't it be handy if they glowed as they did so,
highlighting the location of buried land mines or
contaminated soil? Wormwood shrubs generate a potent
medicine against malaria but only in trace quantities that
are expensive to extract. How many millions of lives could
be saved if the compound, artemisinin, could instead be
synthesized cheaply by vats of bacteria? And although many
cancer researchers would trade their eyeteeth for a cell
with a built-in, easy-to-read counter that ticks over
reliably each time it divides, nature apparently has not
deemed such a thing fit enough to survive in the wild.
It may seem a simple matter of genetic engineering to rewire
cells to glow in the presence of a particular toxin, to
manufacture an intricate drug, or to keep track of the
cells' age. But creating such biological devices is far from
easy. Biologists have been transplanting genes from one
species to another for 30 years, yet genetic engineering is
still more of a craft than a mature engineering discipline.
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Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek.