Some kids get called "bundles of joy" or "slices of heaven" or "dreams come true." We got "the fifty-fourth generation of DNA experiments." Doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel. But maybe I'm oversensitive.
Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We'll be able to modify life in the future.
Transhumanism is the ethics and science of using things like biological and genetic engineering to transform our bodies and make us a more powerful species.
The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.
Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs.
Writing genetic code like we do software will usher in a completely new way of living for all of us. When this happens, our society will be as fundamentally changed as we have seen from the invention of computers.
I wanted to be a genetic engineer. That was my goal in college. I wanted to figure out what the codon sequence was that causes replication in a cardio myopathic virus. That was my goal.
I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
We've been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years - look at a poodle! So we've created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn't be here were it not for us.
A hen's egg is, quite simply, a work of art, a masterpiece of design and construction with, it has to be said, brilliant packaging!
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.
Man, an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.
Biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature.
Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.
Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.
What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.
Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.
Look at spiders. They use about eight different properties of silk for different functions. The spider is like a multimaterial 3D printer.
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.
When you see a fly flitting around your hair or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance. But in my lab, you really see a marvelous machine: arguably the most sophisticated flying device on the planet.
For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.
