Purposeful Design

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The video of Craig Venter’s talk on creating synthetic life just went online along with this fireside chat with TED curator Chris Anderson.

“We’ve been digitizing biology, and now we’re trying to go from that code to designing biology. Can we regenerate life or create new life out of this digital universe?

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware. We can do a transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, with massive new speciation (the formation of new and distinct species) based on this digital design. We have a database with about 20 million genes, and we like to think of them as the design components of the future.

We now have techniques to do combinatorial genomics, to build a robot that can make a million chromosomes a day.

We’re now focusing on fourth-generation designer fuels. Current biofuels aren’t the solution. To have an impact on fuel without increasing the price of food, we start with CO2 as the feedstock – to create new fuels out of CO2.”

(full disclosure: I am on the Board of his company Synthetic Genomics)

7 responses to “Purposeful Design”

PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Mar 8, 2008 at 7:36 am

Just saw it last night. Great talk !
What would be The big "mindblowing TedTalk" for you, this year and why ?

Here is an interesting reading-connection from edge.org in case you haven’t read it yet :
ENGINEERING BIOLOGY-A Talk with Drew Endy

Reply
j_silla

Mar 8, 2008 at 9:28 am

thank you,very interesting!
CO2 sequestration – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2_sequestration

Reply
jurvetson

Mar 8, 2008 at 6:36 pm

@PhotonQ: Yes. I enjoyed that piece and plan to ping Drew about the LEGO metaphor and design challenges in biological systems.

Reply
TomiTapio

Mar 8, 2008 at 10:43 pm

Well… the cellmachine plus software makes more copies of each.
Good shot BTW.

Reply
drona

Mar 9, 2008 at 4:28 pm

I am totally facscinated with this project…

The point about creating designer fuels using CO2 is well made considering the rising prices of corn and other grains because of the land now being used exclusively for fuel production. Shouldn’t be a zero sum game.

It will be interesting to see if this company can generate VC class exits within the life of your fund. I am sure theirs is the right approach.

Will ping you separately about another matter relating to CV.

Reply
amitp

Mar 19, 2008 at 3:40 am

On one hand, I was blown away by the talk, but on the other hand I had to wonder: in one world, we have carbon sequestration, and in the other, we reprocess that carbon back into gasoline, which goes into the atmosphere. It’s only a net positive if we take it out of the atmosphere.

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jurvetson

May 30, 2017 at 5:43 pm

And now, the The Digital-to-Biological Converter (DBC), or "life printer", just came out in Nature Biotech.

Opening, by Dan Gibson and the Synthetic Genomics team: "DNA templates, RNA molecules, proteins and viral particles were produced in an automated fashion from digitally transmitted DNA sequences without human intervention."

Highlights: "First, we synthesized a 1.5-kb DNA fragment encoding GFP."
"We next synthesized Orencia (abatacept), Lucentis (ranibizumab) and Herceptin (trastuzumab) antibody polypeptides"
"We next applied the DBC to produce an RNA vaccine and a bacteriophage, both of which have potential as therapeutics for infectious diseases."
"We also produced functional influenza viral particles (H1N1)"
"Finally, we fully automated production of the ΦX174 bacteriophage, which has a 5,386-bp genome, on the DBC. The genome sequence was manually designed in silico"
"with the incorporation of large-scale synthesis technologies, one can envision the DBC being used in industrial settings to enable high- volume production of biologics such as proteins and RNA vaccines."

Summary release from SGI.

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Purposeful Design

7 responses to “Purposeful Design”

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