[3,200 words]
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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VENTER INSTITUTE SCIENTISTS CREATE FIRST SYNTHETIC BACTERIAL GENOME
PUBLICATION REPRESENTS LARGEST CHEMICALLY DEFINED STRUCTURE SYNTHESIZED IN THE LAB
TEAM COMPLETES SECOND STEP IN THREE STEP PROCESS TO CREATE SYNTHETIC ORGANISM
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On August 27th, at Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, CT, Edge held its annual summer event: "Life: What A Concept". The transcript of the event was published this month by EDGE as a downloadable PDF. ...
At the time, Venter said:
"Right now we're all focused on the genetic code because it's something we can define and the environment is so many orders of magnitude more complex to define, but we're having this trouble with a single cell with a few hundred genes; we as humans have a hundred trillion cells with 23 thousand or so genes, and an infinite number of combinations, so defining our environment is going to be a lot more complicated than that for a single cell. We decided the only way to answer these questions was to make a synthetic chromosome to understand minimal cellular life."
Today, he announced that he's done it, the second step in a three step process to create man-made forms of life. It's big news. Very big news.
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html#V
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LIVE IN NYC - JANUARY 29TH 7:00PM EDGE @ BORDERS
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WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?: TODAY'S LEADING THINKERS ON WHY THINGS ARE GOOD AND GETTING BETTER
John Brockman and contributors Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Steinhardt, Helen Fisher, and John Horgan discuss WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?: TODAY'S LEADING THINKERS ON WHY THINGS ARE GOOD AND GETTING BETTER. Spanning a wide range of topics WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? is an impressive array of what world-class minds have weighed in to offer carefully considered optimistic visions of tomorrow.
January 29, 2008 7:00 PM
BORDERS
Manhattan - Columbus Circle
10 Columbus Circle
New York, NY
Phone:212.823.9775
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html#what
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EDGE AT DLD (DIGITAL, LIFE, DESIGN)
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LIFE: A GENE-CENTRIC VIEW
A conversation with Craig Venter & Richard Dawkins
(Moderator: John Brockman)
It's not everyday you have Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter on a stage talking for an hour about "Life: A Gene-Centric View". That is occurred in Germany, where the culture has been resistant to open discussion of genetics, and at a DLD (Digital Life Design), a high-level Munich conference for the digital elite - the movers and shakers of the Internet - was particularly interesting. Below is a video clip from the event followed by the transcript.
-JB
[STREAMING VIDEO]
VENTER: I was looking at the world from a genome-centric view; the collection of genes that put together lead to any one species. But as we traveled around the world trying to look at the diversity of biology, we came up with larger and larger collections of genes.
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When we look at cells as machines, it makes them very straightforward in the future to design them for very unique utilities. I think all these speak against that one quotation.
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DAWKINS: It's more than just saying you can pick up a chromosome and put it in somewhere else. It is pure information. You could put it into a printed book. You could send it over the Internet. You could store it on a magnetic disk for a thousand years, and then in a thousand years' time, with the technology that they'll have then, it would be possible to reconstruct whatever living organism was here now. What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information; it's digital information; it's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit-for-digit, byte-for-byte into any other kind of information.
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html#dld
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DER SPIEGEL
January 24, 2008
GENETICS REVOLUTION
Craig Venter wants to email life (Craig Venter will Lebewesen e-mailen)
By Christian Stöcker
...Amidst all the enthusiasm for technology, one conversation had more explosive potential than the talking points of all the old and new digital entrepreneurs put together. Only hardly anybody noticed. DLD is always so crowded that you have to stand for the interesting events. But when genetics entrepreneur Craig Venter and genetics revolutionary Richard Dawkins, who took on the entire religious Right with his anti-religious tome The Selfish Gene, got up on stage yesterday to talk about a "gene-centric world view," noticeably fewer people were standing than is often the case. And this even though their talk contained more revolutionary statements and wild forecasts by far than the other presentations looking toward the future.
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html#spiegel
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SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
22. Januar 2008
FEUILLETON
The future of Selection: Scientists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins in Munich (Die Zukunft der Selektion)
By Florian Kessler
Digital or biological? There was a moment during Munich's conference about the future at DLD ( Digital Life Design) this past Monday, that felt like the exchange of a baton. After a rather dull discussion about social platforms on the Internet a burly man entered the stage, introduced himself as John Brockman and proclaimed that the topic of the hour would now be biology.
John Brockman was not just another moderator. In the late summer of 2007 he hosted the now legendary symposium 'Life: What a Concept!' at his farm in Connceticut. This was where six pioneers of science had jointly proclaimed a new era: After the deciphering of the human genome soon whole genomes sequences could be written. That would be the beginning of the age of biology.
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html#sz
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EDGE IN THE NEWS
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THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
IN BRIEF: What Are You Optimistic About?
By James Joseph
To non-scientists, it may not be obvious that science tends to be an optimistic endeavour. While academics working in the arts or humanities may be more equivocal abut the state of the world, those working in science tend to be hopeful, at least about furthering the limits of human knowledge and the possibilities of what can be known in the future. These are essentially optimistic goals.
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html#tls
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This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge234.html
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EDGE
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant
Copyright (c) 2008 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
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EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
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