Dr. J. Craig Venter

Dr. J. Craig Venter and his team at the Venter Institute have synthesised the first cell to have its DNA artificially engineered by a computer, rather than generated from a “parent” cell or parent organism. It is a major step in gene manipulation which has been variously compared to other great feats such as the cloning of Dolly the sheep or even Microsoft’s first operating system.

Venter has synthesised various sections of a microbial DNA sequence, joined the sections together to form a full genetic sequence and introduced the synthesised DNA into an “empty” cell (without DNA information in the nucleus) and managed to “boot up” the host cell.

“To me the most remarkable thing about our synthetic cell is that its genome was designed in the computer and brought to life through chemical synthesis, without using any pieces of natural DNA,” – Dr. Clyde Hutchinson.

New Scientist – Venter’s editorial in New Scientist

Science and Nature magazine news coverage

Science Journal coverage here.

J. Craig Venter Institute

Craig Venter gives a TED.com talk on synthetic genomics from Feb 2008 : -

Many have questioned Venter’s motives and his willingness to map and research the human genome using commercial means along with patents – the Venter Institute is part funded by private equity including Venters own Synthetic Genomics. However, the Venter Institute undertook an ethics review before embarking on this particular venture.

Synthetic cell - M. mycoides JCVI-syn1

2. Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything

3. Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

4. Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

5. Carolyn Porco flies us to Saturn

6. VS Ramachandran on your mind

7. Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny

8. Adam Savage’s obsessions

9. Emily Levine’s theory of everything

10. John Lloyd inventories the invisible

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Other talks of note:

James Randi’s fiery takedown of psychic fraud

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm

George Smoot on the design of the universe

Brian Cox on CERN’s supercollider

Brian Greene on string theory

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a modest goal really. Wolfram only wants to be able to model the universe with computational knowledge. Hold on to your socks – they’re about to be blown off . . .

Come on, let us shoot!

This video clip was brought to my attention the other day from Wikileaks. It shows what can only be described as as massacre of more than a dozen people including two Reuters journalists by US troops in Iraq. You will get a bird’s eye view of the “action” from the POV of the gunner in the helicopter. How they determine that these unarmed people are carrying AK47s and a rocket launcher is really quite unbelievable.

Embedded video is the short version (17 mins approx) the fill 40 minutes can be seen on http://www.collateralmurder.com/

http://www.collateralmurder.com/