Just as physics and chemistry have given humans power over the world of the inanimate, biology is giving us the ability to engineer living systems, from viruses and bacteria to animals and people.
Which is why [Wired co-founder Jane] Metcalfe thinksย designย could be the next big thing in medicine.
Weโll combat disease and improve human health by designing biological systems from the ground up. โWe can design embryos. We can edit genes in humans. We have synthetic biology. And so we really are looking at designing future humans,โ Metcalfe said.
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The ultimate goal is writing whole human genomes from scratch, and [Andrew] Hessel cofounded Genome Project-write (GP-write) to convene the worldโs top synthetic biologists to do just that.
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There are obviouslyย big hurdles that still need clearingโincluding software that can make design more accurate and efficient and DNA synthesis tools that assemble longer base-pair sequencesโand Hesselโs group recently published a paper outlining the challenges.
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โLiterally in 10 years weโve gone from making proteins synthetically to making a eukaryote,โ he said. โAs soon as we can start making whole chromosomes, well, weโve only got 23 of them.โ
Read full, original post: Why Designing Our Own Biology Will Be the Next Big Thing in Medicine
