It sounds like a science fiction scheme, but it’s real.
Drew Endy and the students in his lab at Stanford are exploring the process of programming cells to manufacture DNA. By developing processes to send messages from genomes to cells, they hope to open the key to create a kind of synthetic biological programming platform. As WIRED magazine explains, “The goal is to make that language insensitive to the output genes so that cells will express whatever genes a user wants, much like the print function on a program works regardless of what set of characters you feed it.”
Endy tells The Takeaway why he’s excited by the early stages of his research and what he believes the future of this technology looks like.