Tuesday, February 17, 2009

DIY cells

After watching by this talk by Juan Enriquez, which i highly recommend, I followed up on something he mentioned in his talk that I found kind of amazing. Specifically, Enriquez was talking about the rapid development in the field of engineering cells. In particular, there's been a lot of focus (most conspicuously by bioentrepeneur Craig Venter) on being able to engineer unique living cells that are stripped down to the most basic possible genetic machinery, and this has turned out to be a very promising field. So, the site that I followed up on was this: The Registry of Standard Biological Parts. What a spectacularly mundane name for such an amazing thing. As Enriquez described, it's basically radio shack for cellular engineering. It's a list of "parts," or bits of cellular machinery with very specific functions, with a list of who you can get them from, so that people can put together new cellular machines. Really eerily similar to an electronics catalog...

2 comments:

Brian Chen said...

Just watched the talk. Homo evolutis: Hominids that take direct and deliberate control over the evolution of their species...and others. Is it me or is this just an incredibly anticlimactic conclusion to his talk? Didn't we reach this state some time ago?

James Crall said...

Yeh, I thought it was a weird thing to stick in at the end of a talk without really articulating it at all. I do agree at least generally with the idea that it's a new step in evolution to consciously understand evolutionary principles and enact them rather than being the passive recipients of these dynamics. But yes, it's a pretty vague distinction that seemed out of place in that talk.