[LINK] o/t: synthetic-biology

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

To me, this is a worry .. in comparison, Monsanto GM crops are wonderful.

Teenagers attending $26 courses at a city college in America are playing
at being genetic engineers. They are encouraged to create completely new 
genes, and from there, living bacteria, during short term summer courses.

A new Black Death gene anyone .. with NO known natural genetic defences?

Eg: <www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14Biology-t.html?ref=magazine>

"The faculty adviser, Dirk VandePol, went to City College as a teenager. 
He is 41, with the body language of a man who knows he has left something 
important somewhere but can’t remember where or what. 

VandePol doesn’t even teach genetic engineering. He teaches introductory 
human biology, and signed on to the team for the same reason that his 
students did, "Synthetic biology is the coolest thing in the universe,” 
VandePol told me ..

Synthetic biologists want to write brand-new genetic code, pulling 
together specific genes or portions of genes plucked from a wide range of 
organisms — or even constructed from scratch in a lab — and methodically 
lacing them into a single set of genetic instructions. Implant that new 
code into an organism, and you should be able to make its cells do and 
produce things that nothing in nature has ever done or produced before."

City College's synthetic-biology team (had an) unoccupied basement 
classroom they commandeered as a lab. The school is not a research 
institution — there are no real laboratories.

The school had been facing escalating financial trouble all year, and all 
it could offer the team members was a run-down greenhouse on the top 
floor of the science building. It was filled with plants, flies and 
compost tubs and smelled of mildew and loam. 

So they began squatting in whatever classroom happened to be open on a 
given day, wheeling their materials around the halls on carts. 

There is an irrepressibly playful atmosphere — students stride around in 
team T-shirts or dressed up as bacterial mascots —  grooming an entire 
generation to embrace synthetic biology’s vision — without anyone really 
noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place 
checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have 
even started."





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