The Cell Hijackers
Soon, our knowledge of life processes will let us program cells as we do computers.
By Rodney Brooks
June 2004
Venter and colleagues are working with a very simple bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium, which has only 517 genes. They knocked out genes from the bacterium in an effort to construct a laboratory organism that has the minimal number of genes needed to sustain life and thereby identify a set of functional requirements for a living system. Their goal is to mix and match genes with those functions from different organisms to create a unique living system. Now that’s engineering!
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