4 ms·
A question to those in the know: what kind of education / experience schedule would one need to even think about doing work like this?
by Aetius 16y ago
A question to those in the know: what kind of education / experience schedule would one need to even think about doing work like this?
- crocowhile 16y agoWhat do you mean? You mean reproducing something like this in another lab? Any MSc can do it, under the supervision of a PhD. The bottleneck factor in this kind of experiments is money. I think they spent $1m only on the raw DNA production and Venter got something like $40m funding from Exxon. I have no idea how he convinced exxon that this stuff is any useful technically speaking. It's very interesting scientifically, for sure, but technically? Meh. I suppose exxon went for publicity.
- joegaudet 16y agoI suspect their goal is engineeting bacterium that will produce crude oil, or something of that nature.
- crocowhile 16y agoThe are talking about biofuel. The point is that no matter what you want to do, there is no point in doing it by artificial synthesis. You can always engineer one of the many bacteria/algae/whatever already present in nature, modifying something that already does what you want to achieve, just making it better.
- mkramlich 16y agoOr produce an organism that can eat spilled oil.
- joubert 16y agoIf you listen to the TEd talk, he also mentions federal funding.
- crocowhile 16y agoUnless it's DARPA money, it's probably just an NIH grant. I doubt it's over 1 or 2m.