Did you see Dr J Craig Ventor and his talk on the Richard Dimbleby lecture on BBC the other night.
This was just a small section of it
Young students of science can today make more discoveries in one year than major institutions or countries could make in a decade just a short while ago.
So, what is the value of these discoveries? The answer is many things but one of the most important is a better understanding of life and its evolution on Earth. And what can we do with all this new information that is coming at an exponential pace? We can use these millions of newly discovered organisms and genes to tell us how the environment is changing as a result of human activities.
But above all I believe the best examples of disruptive technologies that could change our future are in the new fields of synthetic biology, synthetic genomics, and metabolic engineering. These fields can change the way we think about life by showing that we can use living systems to increase our chances of survival as a species. Simply put: this area of research will enable us to create new fuels to replace oil and coal.
Imagine scientists in the near future sitting at their computers and designing the chromosome of a new organism, an organism that perhaps could produce fuels biologically, fuels like octane, diesel fuel, jet fuel even hydrogen all from sugar or even sunlight with the carbon coming from carbon dioxide.
Imagine that after designing the new chromosome, the computer directed a robot to chemically make the DNA strand encoding all that information, and that once constructed, the new chromosome would be inserted into a bacterial cell where it becomes activated causing the cell to turn into the species that the scientist designed. And now imagine that new species in a bio-reactor making millions of copies of itself and each copy is producing a new fuel from only renewable sources. Sounds like science fiction right? Not to me, because I believe this is the future
Makes you think, don't it.
