The Guardian view on biotechnologies: rewriting our future | Editorial
DNA is often described as a long string of letters, each representing a particular chemical. The metaphor is about to become much more powerful: scientists are reaching the point where they can arrange these chemical letters with as much precision as ordinary letters in a word processor. They will be able to spell out any protein that they might want a cell to build, a power which will change the world profoundly.
Researchers say they have designed and built six completely synthetic chromosomes for brewers' yeast, an organism with 16 natural ones. There are now strains in which artificial and natural chromosomes work together; in a few years, there will be yeasts whose genome has been entirely designed and built. This work is breathtaking in both ambition and bioengineering achievement. Not content to sequence naturally occurring DNA and reconstruct it artificially, the scientists have cleaned up and reordered it as if it were merely a complex and shoddily maintained computer program. They hope in time to rewrite chromosomes so that their physical structure and logical functions correspond and the chains of different proteins that act together are all made from adjacent stretches of DNA. Software and genetic engineering are coming together to design living organisms the way that the God of creationists is imagined to work.
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