4 ms·

> I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it. I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing

> I've always wanted to build life from scratch, and I finally have a chance to do it. I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing life on Earth, as I recall. :p

koeng 2y ago
good thing we live in real life and not a movie
- mindcrime 2y ago
  Reality is often stranger than fiction though! :-)
  - kragen 2y ago
    Less in keeping with the anti-intellectual witch-hunting political agendas of Hollywood, though.
circles_for-day 2y ago
Don’t worry, synthetic life doesn’t work very well without evolution to tune it into a useful ecological niche. Venter already did something similar. Tampering with existing viruses and symbionts so they can escape their current minima in the fitness landscape is the more dangerous thing.
- koeng 2y ago
  In this case, it is literally the Venter genome, just with removed tRNAs / codon sets. I'm collaborating with them on it (they're just doing the final transformation).