“All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule”*…
The first biological teleporter sits in a lab on the lower level of the San Diego building that houses Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI), looking something like a super-sized equipment cart.
The device is actually conglomeration of small machines and lab robots, linked to each other to form one big machine. But this one can do something unprecedented: it can use transmitted digital code to print viruses.
In a series of experiments culminating last year, SGI scientists used genetic instructions sent to the device from elsewhere in the building to automatically manufacture the DNA of the common flu virus. They also produced a functional bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacterial cells.
Although that wasn’t the first time anyone had made a virus from DNA parts, it was the first time it was done automatically, without human hands.
The device, called a “digital-to-biological converter” was unveiled in May. Though still a prototype, instruments like it could one day broadcast biological information from sites of a disease outbreak to vaccine manufacturers, or print out on-demand personalized medicines at patients’ bedsides…
… or project life-as-we-know it into outer space. More at “Biological Teleporter Could Seed Life Through Galaxy.”
* Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
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As we beam up, we might spare a thought for Sidney Walter Fox; he died on this date in 1998. A biochemist, he was responsible for a series of discoveries about the origin of life. Fox believed in the process of abiogenesis, by which life spontaneously organized itself from the colloquially known “primordial soup,” poolings of various simple organic molecules that existed during the time before life on Earth. In his experiments (which possessed, he believed, conditions like those of primordial Earth), he demonstrated that it is possible to create protein-like structures from inorganic molecules and thermal energy. Dr. Fox went on to create microspheres that he said closely resembled bacterial cells and concluded that they could be similar to the earliest forms of life or protocells.
