Synthetic Life: Now possible…..
Now creating an artificial organism that suits our needs comes under realms of possibilities. The well known maverick in the science society named Craig Venter and his colleagues were first to make such an effort and were successful. The entire procedure to reach this pinnacle is explained by Craig Venter in an interview. What I'm going to tell you about in my 18 minutes is how we're about to switch from reading the genetic code to the first stages of beginning to write the code ourselves. It's only 10 years ago this month when we published the first sequence of a free living organism, that of haemophilus influenzae. That took a genome project from 13 years down to four months. We can now do that same genome project in the order of two to eight hours. So in the last decade, a large number of genomes have been added: most human pathogens, a couple of plants, several insects and several mammals, including the human genome. Genomics at this stage of the thinking from a littl...