Category: Uncategorized

NINETY-NINE PERCENT FAILURES. "When you work on something for 15 years, it's a great sense of accomplishment. You can imagine 99 percent of your experiments fail for one reason or another. This, when it finally worked, we were more relieved than excited.” The first synthetic cell. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/21/venter.qa/ View in LinkedIn

VENTER EMBEDDED QUOTES. "The man-made genetic code also includes three quotes: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life" from James Joyce; "see things not as they are but as they might be" from Robert Oppenheimer via the Ethical Culture School in New York City; and "what I cannot build, I cannot understand" from physicist Richard Feynman.” The first synthetic cell. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

WATERMARKS. “Venter and his colleagues also included four "watermarks" in the code to distinguish the synthetic microbe—dubbed Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0—from natural organisms.” The first synthetic cell. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

PATH FORWARD. “It's not genesis, it's not as if mice are coming from a pile of dirty rags in a corner. The correct word is poesis, human construction. We can now go from information and get a reproducing organism. It lays down the gauntlet for us to learn how to engineer genomes." The first synthetic cell. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

HUGE STEP. “It is a big deal," geneticist and technology developer George Church of Harvard Medical School says of the achievement. "It's not incremental, but it's not final either." The first synthetic cell. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL BIOLOGY. “We call this digitizing biology...We now show that it is possible to reverse this and synthesize cells starting from this digitized information….We refer to the cell we have created as being a synthetic cell because it is a cell controlled by a genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-genome-cell/ View in LinkedIn

GENESIS. “Another common complaint about his 2010 work – that it shows the scientist is intent on "playing God", Venter seems happy to embrace. "In the restricted sense that we had shown with this experiment how God was unnecessary for the creation of new life, I suppose that we were.” https://lnkd.in/dmEGVWN View in LinkedIn

PRINTING CELLS. “Looking further ahead, Venter intends DBCs to print living cells, using an automated and improved version of the process behind his 2010 breakthrough synthetic cell. Work on that is currently underway, with the focus on creating what he calls the "universal recipient cell", a kind of biological blank slate able to receive any synthetic genome and come to life.” (DBC = Digital Biological Converter). https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/13/craig-ventner-mars View in LinkedIn

COMMON VIEW. “Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner argued that Turing machines have much in common with cells and living organisms; that cells and living organisms are, in fact, the best examples of Turing's and von Neumann's machines.” http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3512409/ View in LinkedIn