Folks, This is a snip from The Globe and Mail of 17th Decemeber, 2005. Mervyn3.0 -------------------------------
Playing God in running shoes. Welcome to the age of synthesized life, built from scratch. Soon, it may be so cheap and simple a teen hacker could do it. Or a terrorist. CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports By CAROLYN ABRAHAM Saturday, December 17, 2005 Page F1 It's 8 o'clock on a Wednesday night at the University of Toronto's medical sciences building, and Emanuel Nazareth holds a Petri dish up to the light. He squints at the clear, tiny bubbles dotting its amber surface, as though staring at it will make it grow. It's three days till show time and their project looks like spit on a plate. He pops it back in the incubator without saying a word. Assistant engineering professor Stephen Davies trudges past, both hands buried deep in the pockets of his khakis, and sighs. He knows the score. With less than 48 hours of growing time left, "it's going to take a miracle" to make this project fly. But Matt Scott, a 30-year-old mathematician pitching in from the University of Waterloo, is beaming. It's his first night. Never before has he dirtied his hands in a "wet" lab, shifting from the cold world of manipulating numbers to manipulating life: "It's just really neat," he says, "fiddling with genetic components to get a certain behaviour." Fiddling, indeed. Here in this fourth-floor lab, where a poster in a stairwell advertises a lecture titled "Does God exist?", these young minds are at serious play in the Lord's proverbial fields, transforming living things into toys of their choice. E. coli, the common intestinal bug and scourge of undercooked hamburger, is being remade into a living Etch A Sketch that could say, "Hi Mom." Another batch is being reprogrammed to change colour, like a mood ring, at different temperatures. And, ready or not, their efforts have earned them an invite to one of the more ambitious science fairs ever held. There will be no papier-mâché volcanoes, robots or homemade clocks at this competition. It's being held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the planet's mecca of innovation. The exhibits will be lab-made life forms modified with genetic parts that were dreamed up, designed and constructed with computers and DNA. If you think designing life is the sacred business of a divine executive, think again. In the 21st century, this godlike power is shared by people who schlep backpacks and study for mid-terms, such as Mr. Nazareth, a 22-year-old, fourth-year engineering undergrad. In reading DNA, science isn't much beyond the "See Dick run" stage. Yet a growing scientific movement is already afoot to rewrite it. The goal is audacious -- to make living things that behave like invented gadgets. This emerging science is called synthetic biology, a term that confirms the profound, if eerie, fact that creating DNA -- the building block of life -- is no longer the sole domain of nature. New and relatively cheap computing technology is allowing students and even non-scientists to assemble the chemical chains that encode genetic functions, making it possible to design and construct genes, and soon perhaps life itself, from scratch. At this very moment, in a lab outside Washington, D.C., scientist Craig Venter, famous for mapping a private version of the human genome in 2000, is leading efforts to create the world's first human-designed species. Driving the field is a twin-engine philosophy: First is the idea that the best way truly to understand life is to build it. Second is the hope that these life forms could be harnessed to do human bidding. The genetic codes of organisms could be rewritten to produce hard-to-make drugs, gobble up pollution, pump out clean energy, kill cancer cells or simply grow flowers that bloom on your birthday. "There is nothing mystical or spiritual about this. I don't have to invoke the gods," says Toronto researcher Andrew Hessel, raising his arms to the heavens one stormy morning. "DNA is the only language used to program life on this planet. . . . To change the organism, you change the instructions in the DNA program." In the 19th century, chemists learned to synthesize organic compounds they once thought only nature could make. From there, they went on to invent a raft of things, from plastics to polyester, that nature never imagined. -snip- Emanuel Nazareth began programming computers at the age of 10, not long after he and his family emigrated from Kenya to the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. First, it was text-based, in BASIC. Then colour came along. For fun, he modelled worlds with Sim City. He would make games, animate the characters he created and compete with friends over e-mail in building fantasy lands. "Too much!" his mother would say of his computer time. "Go out and play sports!" After graduating from high school with a 93 per cent average, he secured a spot in biomedical engineering at U of T, one of the more competitive undergrad programs in the country. And so the slight, serious and extremely soft-spoken Mr. Nazareth comes at genetics like an engineer, describing it in mechanical terms. As he wrote in a school essay this spring, genes are to him components of a network powered by circuits. Biology is a system best manipulated when broken down into modules. A few weeks before the iGEM competition, over a bowl of linguine at an Italian café near campus, Mr. Nazareth explains that he decided his future lay in bioengineering after seeing an artificial arm being controlled by the inputs and outputs of the nervous system. So he volunteered to join this year's iGEM team and work with Prof. Davies and students such as Hannah Fong, the 21-year-old immunology student who came up with the Etch A Sketch idea. Their bacterial machines, Mr. Nazareth realizes, are just dazzling gizmos to explore and demonstrate the potential of synthetic biology -- which, he says, is endless. One example he offers over lunch is a cell programmed to roam the body and chew up bad cholesterol. "If you can take even the most rudimentary concepts of electrical engineering and can pull them off in a cell," Mr. Nazareth says, "the control that could give you and the applications are mind-boggling." For the full story see: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051217/COVER17/TPScience/?query=nazareth __________________________________________________________ Find your next car at http://autos.yahoo.ca -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Goa - 2005 Santosh Trophy Champions | | | | Support Soccer Activities at the grassroots in our villages | | Vacationing in Goa this year-end - Carry and distribute Soccer Balls | --------------------------------------------------------------------------