Here's a rough transcript of Dr. Baltimore's talk: I helped organize Asilomar. That was more than 30 years ago; none of you were born then, but perhaps you've heard of it. Back then we had no experience with recombinant technology. We didn't know what to expect of it ...

Caroline Ajo-Franklin (Harvard Medical School) presented work on a cell-cycle counter. Steffen Mueller (SUNY Stony Brook) spoke about synthetic virus design. Live attenuated viruses are usually generated through big serial dilutions in a costly and time consuming process, and the resulting mutations that attenuate it are usually few in number. Instead, ...

Retrotransposition is one of the two basic types of transposition we find in biology. It's sort of fun to survey where transposons are in the tree of life: in the case of more eukaryotes, most of the genome is transposons; little of microbial genomes are retrotransposons. LINEs (L1) transposon sequences ...

"The world's major killers are killers because they elude immune attack: HIV, malaria, tuberculosis," etc. What are needed are new approaches to stopping these pathogens. "The don't work because they haven't worked" - and what I mean by that is that the immune system is gonna fail when ...

Let's engineer a "super" salmonella that can construct and extrude silk filaments from its membrane. Spider silks have a wide variety of desirable materials properties. Dragline silk is equal strength of kevlar, but 10 times more elastic. Silks are amino acid biopolymers with elastic and crystalline elements, ...

For any therapeutic intervention, dosing is key. Consider a system for gas-inducible transcription control composed of a fungal trans-activator (expected to be functional in mammalian cells), AlcR, and an operator, activated by small concentrations of a chemical found in tabacco smoke. Some of their work (biotechnol bioeng. 83:810 2003) demonstrated that different ...

Overview of Health & Synthetic Biology by Wedell Lim: The ability to systematically and flexibly manipulate and control cellular systems is the threshold to a new era in medicine, hence the importance of synthetic biology synthetic organic chemistry -> intellectual capital: understanding of biochemical reactions; tangible benifits: construction of novel molecules Synthetic biology ...

First point: "I really don't think this has any practical applications, at least in the foreseeable future." Goal is to build a simple cell based on a replication vesicle for compartmentalization and a replicating genome. If the cell is to be simple, the environment must be correspondingly complex. ...

Chemical tools for probing the glycome - Carolyn Bertozzi Glycosyltation is the most complex form of posttranslational modification. polysaccharaides attached to membrane-bound proteins can facilitate cell-cell (or membrane-membrane, at least) communication by interacting with corresponding membrane-bound receptors. Fundamental "glycomics" questions: Which proteins are modified with what kinds of glycans (50% of eykaryotic ...

Let's make a new communication system by utilizing an existing communication system. "I'm just the parts lady; I'm the one who has to sit there figure out how to define parts to... and so LuxR is my chosen substrate." Novel idea for using signal pathways: predator-prey system, consensus consortium - something activates ...