Category: Uncategorized

CRAIG VENTER claimed to have made the first new addition to the tree of life in the history of the universe. https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2016/03/24/bio-maverick-craig-venter-hacks-bacteria-to-have-tiniest-possible-genetic-code/#12f01f8d3505 View in LinkedIn

NEW LIFE FORMS. "The biologist has become an engineer, coding new life forms as desired." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

COMPUTING AND BIOLOGY. "These two fields, each with spectacular private-sector and academic engagement, are colliding, merging, and transforming one another, as computer scientists speak of "DNA-based computation" and synthetic biologists talk of "life circuit boards." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

LIFE CIRCUIT BOARDS. "Andrew Ellington and Jared Ellefson of the University of Texas at Austin argued that a new breed of biologists was taking over the frontiers of science -- a breed that views life forms and DNA much the way the technology wizards who spawned IBM, Cisco, and Apple once looked at basic electronics, transistors, and circuits." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

TRANSITION TO LIVING MOLECULES. "However, once informational macromolecules are given the opportunity to inherit profitable variation through self-sustained Darwinian evolution, they just may take on a life of their own." Read very carefully. http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

ENGINE OF INNOVATION. "Life on Earth ... has demonstrated extraordinary resiliency and inventiveness in adapting to highly disparate niches. Perhaps the most significant invention of life is a genetic system that has an extensible capacity for inventiveness, something that likely will not be achieved soon for synthetic biological systems." http://www.cfr.org/united-states/biologys-brave-new-world/p31894 View in LinkedIn

DISRUPTIVE EFFICIENCIES. "In the past 25 years, modern society has seen many disruptive innovations, most of which have been based on a single platform: the internet. The key feature of most disruptive innovations is their ability to exploit and eliminate inefficiencies in existing systems. The connectedness enabled by the internet has allowed companies across a range of industries to replace traditional, capital-intensive approaches with new ways of doing business." https://lnkd.in/dPP5UrP View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS these two weekends looking at RNA virus quasispecies. No other creature on this planet has such a high rate of mutation, and viruses are the largest pool of genetic diversity; they actively exchange genes between them and with their hosts. These shimmering and shape-shifting populations have played a key role in evolution, and equally, when the symbiotic spectrum is at the extreme, represent diseases that can be very hard to treat. That said, the vast majority of viruses are benign, and co-exist happily with their host ecosystems. View in LinkedIn

INNOVATION is intimately linked to economic growth. "A large proportion of US economic growth in the 20th century was derived from technological and related innovation." https://lnkd.in/dEAvzMk View in LinkedIn

SHIFTING CLOUD. "Quasispecies theory has encouraged viewing and examining viruses as complex mutant spectra, and not merely as simple genetic entities that can be described with a defined nucleotide sequence, as believed only a few decades ago." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682215001580 View in LinkedIn