Craig Venter on headless humans and predicting your exact face from your DNA

3 responses to “Craig Venter on headless humans and predicting your exact face from your DNA”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Feb 18, 2015 at 5:40 pm

   Building a novel species with the smallest genome on the planet, with the genes organized by function, so kids can build on the simplest base to recapitulate all of biologyThe mess on the left is an evolved organism in nature; the engineered DNA on the right removes the useless bits and reorganizes according to function (reading from top to bottom: base excision repair, transcription, translation, lipid salvage, nucleotide salvage, glycolysis, other). It is built in the lab with chips and microfluidics (no animals involved in the DNA synthesis).

   Improving the efficiency of photosynthesis itselfand then…

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2. 

   Gwen ‘s

   Feb 20, 2015 at 12:51 am

   Sounds good! And hopefully the pigs will be treated well in their short lives.

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3. 

   jurvetson

   Oct 20, 2021 at 4:46 pm

   Success! From today’s NPR: “In a major scientific advance, a pig kidney is successfully transplanted into a human. ‘It had absolutely normal function,’ said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the surgical team last month at NYU Langone Health. ‘It didn’t have this immediate rejection that we have worried about.’ More than 90,000 people in the U.S. are in line for a kidney transplant. Every day, 12 die while waiting. The advance is a win for Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics, the company that engineered the pig and its cousins, a herd of 100 raised in tightly controlled conditions at a facility in Iowa. The pigs lack a gene that produces alpha-gal, the sugar that provokes an immediate attack from the human immune system.”

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