24c3: Programming DNA – A 2-bit language for engineering biology

Previously: 24c3: The history of guerilla knitting. There’s more links and images about the congress on MAKE.

I agree with Eliot Phillips from Hack a Day: Drew Endy‘s talk on Programming DNA at 24c3 was the best thing i’ve listened to last week. The video is there for you to agree or disagree with us.

Endy, co-founder of the BioBricks Foundation (BBF), came to Berlin with the hope that “the conferees of 24C3 will help me to understand how to best enable an overwhelmingly constructive hacker culture for programming DNA”. Endy campaigns for a more open culture of biological technology, where biological engineering would not have to be confined to the laboratories of high-end industry laboratories.

Using BioBrick™ standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer. The DNA sequence information and other characteristics of BioBrick™ standard biological parts are made available to the public free of charge currently via MIT’s Registry of Standard Biological Parts.

Another video features Drew Endy discussing BioBrick standard biological parts and in this podcast he talks about open source biology.

Oh! And don’t miss the comic he worked on together with Isadora Deese & The MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group: Adventures in Synthetic Biology.

4Comments

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1

David Mery on January 5, 2008 at 5:25 pm

You may be interested by Luca Cardelli‘s work as well. In particular Bioware Languages.
br -d
2

cati on January 6, 2008 at 5:26 pm

Such an awesome comic. Thank you!
3

Angelo Vermeulen on January 10, 2008 at 12:08 am

I personally find this whole endeavor highly suspicious. To play with DNA like that is totally irresponsible, and goes way beyond the concerns that already exist over GMOs. But BioBricks sounds so cool – the inventors even set up fancy contests. Great. This sort of stuff should only be practiced by people who know what they’re doing and in a confined and regulated context. I cannot imagine what would happen if these types of organisms would be released out in the open.
By the way, it’s not BioBrick, it’s BioBrickTM. It’s a marketing trick by a smart and money-hungry industry that finally hopes to neutralize people’s fear of genetic engineering.
4

DNA Art on December 9, 2008 at 9:56 am

Great,loads of good presentations there, You did a good job with this one. Thanks

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