Month: September 2022

ECONOMIC DRIVER. "Synbio could produce both transformative science and big business. By some estimates, the global market for synthetic biology is projected to grow to $16 billion by 2018. Much of the anticipated activity centers on pharmaceuticals, diagnostic tools, chemicals, and energy products, such as biofuels." https://lnkd.in/dgV87Ca View in LinkedIn

DIAL UP PROPERTIES. "A future bio designer should be able to code the properties of a living system…by describing the desired features in a biological programming language. That programming language could be DNA, properly understood; but a better analogy might be to see DNA as the machine language — the 1s and 0s, of biology." https://lnkd.in/diYQdpu View in LinkedIn

BIOPUNK. "iGEM stands for the “International Genetically Engineered Machines” competition. Thousands of student bioengineers from all over the world construct new life forms and race them every year at the Giant Jamboree in Boston. iGEM has been going on for ten years (2,500 competitors this year, over 32 countries, 20,000+ alumni) and gives a peerless window into the global grassroots synthetic-biology revolution." https://lnkd.in/d7F2bmz View in LinkedIn

"DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY, the design and self-assembly of artificial nucleic acid-based structures or systems, has developed with a breath-taking pace in recent years. The technology offers an unparalleled ability to control structure and function at the molecular level and the sizes of the structures are expanding towards the micrometer domain." http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/Denmark_Workshop_2013.pdf View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL TO CHEMICAL INFORMATION. "In nature the digital information of the genome is transcribed to RNA and then translated into proteins by the complex machinery of the ribosome. One of the holy grails of DNA computing and DNA nanotechnology is to make artificial systems that can convert digital information into chemical molecules with similar efficiency." http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/Denmark_Workshop_2013.pdf View in LinkedIn

NEUROCHEMISTRY TODAY has achieved huge success digitizing human brain electrical activity into meaningful information, as we will see in some future blog strings. View in LinkedIn

HISTORIC MOMENT. "Many, if not most, of the participants of the workshop felt that they were witnessing the birth of a new information technology." http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/Denmark_Workshop_2013.pdf View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS, or at least pauses, this section on mobile genetic elements, these freaky bits of DNA that float around, evolve, reproduce and accelerate evolution and adaptation. Constantly ongoing, in constant flux, they are the primary engine of prokaryotic evolution. Floating code, almost Haiku, the very nature of existence. And clearly, this has massive human applications. View in LinkedIn

CROWNING GLORY OF EVOLUTION? Many believe that this is man. However, man may have been evolution's greatest error. Forget the big brain, forget the opposable thumbs and forget technology. Man is the greatest threat to planet earth, motivated by ideology, greed and pathology, each of which has decimated the greatest number of people and life forms. View in LinkedIn

THE SECRET OF LIFE'S ORIGIN has been evasive. In part because it had eons in which to happen, under conditions we could hardly begin to replicate. Included in this question is the simple, yet heretical, question — did life only arise on Planet Earth? View in LinkedIn