A non-post about Craig Venter’s new bug
In case you have been vacationing in a parallel universe in the past two days, you should have heard about the new synthetic bacterium created at the J Craig Venter Institute. In a nutshell, the scientific team synthesized an artificial chromosome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and transferred it to another bacterium, Mycoplasma capricolum. The capricolum cells with the mycoides genome proved viable, and were named Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. Even more briefly they synthesized Bug A’s DNA from scratch, put it in bug B, turning B into A.
I wanted to write a blog post about it. I really did. Something original, inspiring, funny, critical and deep. But so many others beat me to it, so no matter what angle I took, it’s already been covered in the last 24 hours. Informative? Yes. Debateable achievement? Yes yes, and yes. Thoughts from bigshots? Yes. Funny? totally. Religiously suspect? Verily. Government weighing in? Naturally. Reddit? Yes, even Reddit! (Thanks Shirley!)
So here’s the interview Science journal conducted with Craig Venter:
Or, if you’d rather, the Scorpions’ comment:
And the paper in Science. I’m done.
Gibson, D., Glass, J., Lartigue, C., Noskov, V., Chuang, R., Algire, M., Benders, G., Montague, M., Ma, L., Moodie, M., Merryman, C., Vashee, S., Krishnakumar, R., Assad-Garcia, N., Andrews-Pfannkoch, C., Denisova, E., Young, L., Qi, Z., Segall-Shapiro, T., Calvey, C., Parmar, P., Hutchison, C., Smith, H., & Venter, J. (2010). Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1190719
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