How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves

✍ Scribed by Church, George; Regis, Ed

• Book ID: 107257319
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 2 MB
• Series: Regenesis
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Everyone has heard of genetic engineering: we eat engineered foods, we take drugs made in engineered bacteria and yeast, and someday soon may drive our cars on fuel produced by engineered microorganisms. Regenesis is the story of where these technologies came from, and where they're going, told by the man leading the revolution: Harvard genetics professor George Church.

While traditional genetic engineering introduces changes to an organism a few genes at a time, genomic engineering introduces changes on a wholesale basis, allowing for unprecedented feats of synthetic biological engineering. (The technique, called MAGE, was invented by the author.) In Regenesis, Church argues for the great potential of this technology, not only to make existing organisms more useful, but for inventing wholly new species—bacterial, animal, and human. It promises to be a strange future, with biohackers building organisms in their garages, companies manufacturing toolkits of...