24c3: Programming DNAA 2-bit language for engineering biology

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

0aadnaadventure.jpgI 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.