The new new thing (synthetic biology)

It’s fairly clear that nanotechnology is no longer the new new thing. A recent story in Business Week - Nanotech Disappoints in Europe - is not atypical. It takes its lead from the recent difficulties of the UK nanotech company Oxonica, which it describes as emblematic of the nanotechnology sector as a whole: “a story of early promise, huge hype, and dashed hopes.” Meanwhile, in the slightly neophilic world of the think-tanks, one detects the onset of a certain boredom with the subject. For example, Jack Stilgoe writes on the Demos blog “We have had huge fun running around in the nanoworld for the last three years. But there is a sense that, as the term ‘nanotechnology’ becomes less and less useful for describing the diversity of science that is being done, interesting challenges lie elsewhere… But where?”

Source: Soft Machines.

Engineered Virus Attacks Bacteria

Scientists have engineered viruses to attack and destroy mega-colonies of potentially harmful bacteria called biofilms.

The work is one of the latest potential applications to emerge from synthetic biology, a burgeoning field that aims to change the genomes of organisms on large scales to make them more useful to humans or to even craft new life forms from scratch.

Source: Live Science.

The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering

Three years ago in The Atlantic, the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel wrote a critique of genetic engineering titled “The Case Against Perfection.” Now he has turned it into a book. The title is the same, but the text has changed, and sections have been added. That’s what human beings do. We try to improve things.
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Sandel thinks this vision of freedom is flawed. Part of freedom, he argues, “consists in a persisting negotiation with the given.” To abolish the given by re-engineering not only our world but also ourselves would “leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.” This is a profound insight. But it’s not fatal to freedom. It’s fatal to perfection.

Source: NY Times.

Cell-transistor interface clears biolectronics hurdle

PORTLAND, Ore. — Researchers at the Max Planck Institute (Munich, Germany) have developed a cell-transistor interface that they believe will usher in a new era of bioelectronics, allowing cells to be manipulated and studied without destroying them in the process.

Source: EETimes.

Brain Boosters

Two days from now I’m planning to further tweak my mind by taking a brain-boost pill. Called Provigil, it differs from its predecessors in that it is believed to home in on a section of the brain that helps govern alertness and memory. The pill is manufactured by ­Cephalon of Frazer, PA, and its active ingredient is called modafinil. The drug’s targeted delivery is supposed to prevent the side effects of stimulants that diffuse throughout the brain and rev up everything.

Source: Technology Review. See also “Climbing Walls with Carbon Nanotubes”.

Human therapeutic cloning moves closer to reality

Human therapeutic cloning has moved one step closer to reality. Stem cells have been extracted from cloned monkey embryos for the first time - and if it works in monkey cells, why not in human cells too?

Source: New Scientist.

See also: “Virus ‘hybrids’ can act as nanoscale memory devices”.

Craig Venter succeeds in ‘genome transplant’

Call it bacterial alchemy: using a “genome transplant”, researchers have turned one species of bacterium into another. The transformation is the latest feat from US genomics pioneer Craig Venter, and marks another step towards his goal of creating a synthetic life-form.

Read the entire article at New Scientist.

See also “Blood cells can raft nanoparticles around the body”, New Scientist.

The Ideal Gene Delivery Vector: Chromallocytes, Cell Repair Nanorobots for Chromosome Replacement Therapy

The ultimate goal of nanomedicine is to perform nanorobotic therapeutic procedures on specified individual cells comprising the human body.  This paper reports the first theoretical scaling analysis and mission design for a cell repair nanorobot.  One conceptually simple form of basic cell repair is chromosome replacement therapy (CRT), in which the entire chromatin content of the nucleus in a living cell is extracted and promptly replaced with a new set of prefabricated chromosomes which have been artificially manufactured as defect-free copies of the originals.

Read the entire article at Journal of Evolution and Technology.

See also the “Singularity Warfare: A Bibliometric Survey of Militarized Transhumanism“

Molecular holograms are coming into focus

3D images of individual molecules may soon be possible thanks to a breakthrough in holography by Swiss scientists. The technique would be useful to biologists interested in how the shapes of proteins and other components of life relate to their function.

Via New Scientist.

Patent sought on ’synthetic life’

Scientists working to build a life form from scratch have applied to patent the broad method they plan to use to create their “synthetic organism”.
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The J Craig Venter Institute’s US patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic “free-living organism that can grow and replicate” made using those genes.

Via BBC.