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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| Today in "Don't these people read science fiction?" from Quanta: He’s Gleaning the Design Rules of Life to Re-Create It  Yizhi “Patrick” Cai is coordinating a global effort to write a complete synthetic yeast genome. If he succeeds, the resulting cell will be the artificial life most closely related to humans to date. Because in science fiction, creating new life always ends well. However, the ability to write a genome from scratch would unlock greater creativity in designing a desired genome... and producing new kinds of organisms that do things that nature cannot. You know, like eating plastic waste. Or every other living thing. “If you see the genome as the operating system of organisms, then writing the genome is basically giving you an opportunity to reorganize the genome and to program living organisms,” said Yizhi “Patrick” Cai of the University of Manchester. My computer got bricked for a short period yesterday, thanks to an operating system update from Microsuck. A eukaryotic cell is probably more complicated that my laptop (not in terms of computing power, but just, like, possible permutations of base pairs or whatever). In the future, researchers could engineer new cells with novel abilities and greater tolerance for environmental conditions such as heat and drought. Sure, novel abilities... like taking over the planet. Cai is the coordinator of the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project, a global consortium aimed at redesigning the genome for brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Okay, I hereby take back all my snarky comments. This could lead to better beer! How can I help fund this research? The combinatorial space for the yeast genome — natural or synthetic — is vast; exploring it and tweaking each genetic component individually to understand its purpose and context is impractically slow. But isn't that what AI is for? That and taking people's clothes off in pictures. Much of the article is an interview of Yizhi Cai, and I don't have anything to comment about it. Mostly, I just wanted to point out that sometimes, a scientific advance is scary, at least until we use it to make the world better; in this case, with beer. |
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