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Genome writing project aims to rally scientists around virus-proofing cells
Launched in 2016 with the sprawling ambition to build large genomes, the synthetic biology initiative known as Genome Project–write (GP-write) is now, slowly, getting down to specifics. Ahead of a meeting today in Boston, GP-write's leadership announced a plan to organize its international group of collaborators around a "community-wide project": engineering cells to resist viral infection.
GP-write's original proposal to design and assemble an entire human genome from scratch seems to have receded from view since the project's rocky launch, when a private meeting of its founders sparked accusations of secrecy and speculations about labmade humans. A proposal published weeks later in Science described GP-write as a decadelong effort to reduce by more than 1000-fold the cost of engineering and testing large genomes consisting of hundreds of millions of DNA letters.
The narrower project announced today—redesigning the genomes of cells from humans and other species to make them "ultrasafe"—represents "a theme that could run through all of GP-write," says geneticist Jef Boeke of New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, who leads the project along with Harvard University geneticist George Church, lawyer Nancy Kelley of Nancy J Kelley + Associates in New York City, and biotechnology catalyst Andrew Hessel of the San Francisco, California–based software company Autodesk Research.
Previously: Genome Project-Write To Attempt Synthesis of Human Genomes
Genome Project-write Still Looking for Funding
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday May 14 2018, @11:03PM
It was in the technically possible but questionable if it could ever be feasible category. Many of the ideas the current crop of silicon valley transhumanists talk about actually date back to the 80s.
Much of this was along the lines of assuming you have control of matter at very small scales and then imagining what you could do with it. The archives of the Extropians, >H, and transhuman tech mailing lists are full of a lot of such ideas. Often from the people who originated them.