April 8, 2020
(Scientific American) – In theory, this substance can hold a vast amount of information—up to one exabyte (one billion gigabytes) per cubic millimeter of DNA—for millennia. (The magnetic tape that serves as the foundation of most digital archives has a … Read More
March 16, 2020
(STAT News) – With Gates and NIH funding, the emerging field of synthetic biology is answering the SOS over Covid-19, aiming to engineer vaccines that overcome these obstacles. “It’s all of us against the bug,” said Neil King of the University … Read More
March 4, 2020
(Forbes) – By 2030, almost 400,000 Americans a year will die of diabetes – many of them unnecessarily. Synthetic biology companies are working hard to ensure that’s not the case. Here’s a look into the next generation of continuous glucose … Read More
February 24, 2020
(Nature) – Only a handful of genomes have been synthesized so far, mostly for bacteria. Synthetic biologist Jason Chin and his colleagues at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, have rewritten the genome of Escherichia coli, and … Read More
December 13, 2019
Public Understand of Science (vol. 28, no. 3, 2019) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Content, Evaluations and Influences in Newspaper Coverage of Predictive Genetic Testing: A Comparative Media Content Analysis from the United Kingdom and Switzerland” by … Read More
November 7, 2019
(GEN) – We are already living in a synthetic biology world. Within that huge world is an enormous variety of ideas and approaches, like custom-made proteins, CAR-T medicines, genetically engineered crops, and more. One sector still in its infancy is … Read More
October 25, 2019
(Newsweek) – A devastating string of mass shootings has left the country reeling this year. But an even greater threat may be looming in the near future, one with the potential to cause far more widespread injury and loss of … Read More
October 18, 2019
(Science) – Engineering biology with recombinant DNA, broadly called synthetic biology, has progressed tremendously in the last decade, owing to continued industrialization of DNA synthesis, discovery and development of molecular tools and organisms, and increasingly sophisticated modeling and analytic tools. … Read More
September 24, 2019
(NPR) – Making genes from scratch used to be laborious and time consuming, but not anymore. That’s why federal officials are now considering new measures to prevent this rapidly advancing technology from being misused to create dangerous viruses or bioweapons. … Read More
September 16, 2019
(CNN) – Genes and genomes are based on code– just like the digital language of computers. But instead of zeros and ones, four DNA letters — A, C, T, G — encode all of life. (Life is messy, and there … Read More
