January 17, 2006
Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service
By ANDREW POLLACK
There are bacteria that blink on and off like Christmas tree
lights and bacteria that form multicolored patterns of concentric
circles resembling an archery target. Yet others can reproduce
photographic images.
These are not strange-but-true specimens from nature, but rather
the early tinkering of synthetic biologists, scientists who seek to
create living machines and biological devices that can perform novel
tasks.
"We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics,"
said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and a leader in
the field. "We want to design and manufacture complicated biological
circuitry."
While much of the early work has consisted of eye-catching, if
useless, stunts like the blinking bacteria, the emerging field could
one day have a major impact on medicine and industry.
For instance, Christina D. Smolke, an assistant professor at the
California Institute of Technology, is trying to develop circuits of
biological parts to sit in the body's cells and guard against cancer.
If they detected a cancer-causing mechanism had been activated, they
would switch on a gene to have the cell self-destruct.
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/science/17synt.html
