Pursuing Synthetic Life, Dazzled by Reality
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The most profound insights to emerge from the pursuit of synthetic life just may be about real life.
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Within 50 years, biotech will suffuse everyday life just as computer technology does now -- so says Freeman Dyson.  It's not new, but the futurist describes his vision, from DIY genetic engineering for pigeon fanciers and schoolchildren to green industrial.
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Billionaire biologist J. Craig Venter is part of a new kind of scientific explorer whose uncharted territory was his own genes.
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The darkness of the soul encounters the science of pharmaceuticals.
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Researchers create three-dimensional structures using DNA-directed assembly.
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Science & environment: Italian scientist takes vital step towards building a living organism from scratch.
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Synthetic biology turns a bacteriophage into an E. coli eliminator.
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Remote-control sharks, pain guns, radioactive scorpion venom ... Bond-like technology is unnervingly real in some labs. By Greta Lorge from Wired magazine.
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Once the cutting-edge materials of engineering were steel girders, then transistors. And next, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is gambling, it will be DNA and cells -- the stuff of life.
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New procedure lets adult mouse cells mimic stem cells, bringing hope to anticloning activists.
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Scientists have taken a first step toward making synthetic life by transferring genetic material from one bacterium into another, transforming the second microbe into a copy of the first.
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A close-up view of the human genome reveals its innermost workings to be far more complex than first thought.
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Newbie finds the world of "Second Life" to be fantastical, brimming with possibility, and surprisingly like the real world. Images: Scoping out 'Second Life'
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Human skin teems with a zoo of strange microbes in colonies that are nearly unique from person to person and many of which are practically unknown to science, new research finds. Some of the bugs are permanent residents, while others come and go.
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Synthetic biology aims to create new creatures by establishing a standardized set of DNA parts and then installing them like interchangeable electrical components in stripped-down breadboard organisms.
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Researchers have assembled the entire genome of a living organism -- a bacterium -- in what they hope is an important step to creating artificial life.
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The experiment is part of an explosion in the new field of synthetic biology.