A milestone on the way to artificial organisms: Beat Christen’s group at ETH Zurich produced the first completely artificial bacterial genome. (Photograph: ETH Zurich / Agnieszka Wormus)
A milestone on the way to artificial organisms: Beat Christen's group at ETH Zurich produced the first completely artificial bacterial genome. (Photograph: ETH Zurich / Agnieszka Wormus) - Bioengineers are on the brink of developing artificial organisms that will open up new applications in medicine and industry. Beat Christen discusses their risks and benefits. Every living creature on earth has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on - representing an unbroken line of ancestry all the way back to the very first organisms that lived here billions of years ago. Soon we will have life forms that have no such direct lineage. The first of these organisms will be bacteria. Bioengineers will use computers to develop such bacteria and specifically tailor them for applications in medicine, industry or agriculture.
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