Having experience in this field, I'm usually very cautious about the sort of over-exuberance displayed in this article. First of all, the title is misleading. T

Having experience in this field, I'm usually very cautious about the sort of over-exuberance displayed in this article. First of all, the title is misleading. The 100,000x speed up is vs the uncatalyzed reaction, not vs some other enzyme. As enzymes go, that makes the man-made protein still about 4-6 orders of magnitude (10,000-1,000,000x) slower than the best enzymes. There is a lot of interesting research going on in this field, but I worry that, like much of modern science, the focus is too much on "how can I turn this into a product" and less on "have we answered all the questions". The way I was taught was that Scientists answer the questions, and Engineers come up with the applications. What we have today is a lot of Scientists acting like Engineers. One such unanswered question: How do we factor in entropy? (I did my Ph.D. prelim exam on that topic... If anyone is interested -- http://github.com/jballanc/prelim/raw/9a4ab5287b6776b9987834838e0a9b8a7be2c3f0/prelim.pdf http://github.com/jballanc/prelim/raw/9a4ab5287b6776b9987834...) What's interesting about that topic is the way that we're applying new approaches and algorithms to the questions being asked. So, while the future of this field is certainly bright, we're still at the head-down keep-pushing-forward stage... ...keep the champaign on ice for now.