[LINK] o/t Creation of a Bacterial Cell

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Hi all,

Creation of a Bacterial Cell 

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/maynard20100522

"This week’s announcement takes the idea of designing living systems in 
the digital domain – then reading them back into reality – to the next 
level.  Okay so you can split hairs and say that Venter and his crew 
didn’t technically synthesize life – they needed a few existing 
components (the machinery of the cell) to start with.  But it really is 
splitting hairs, because the synthetic genome included the code that 
allowed this machinery to be constructed from scratch in subsequent 
generations of the organism."  

"The breakthrough here was the ability to write the complete code for an 
organism on a computer, then translate it into a real, living, 
replicating life form."

Abstract: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719

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Cheers,
Stephen