"Check out Carl Zimmer’s recent article in the New York Times, “Scientists Are Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life”:
"These plans demand tremendous amounts of engineering. The genome of Escherichia coli is about four million bases long, and each type of codon appears in thousands of different places along its length. To carry out so many changes, the researchers must build entire genomes from scratch…
The scientists had to invent a lot of repairs to undo the damage, including separating overlapping pairs of genes to create two distinct stretches of DNA.
“We definitely went through these periods where we were like, ‘Well, will this be a dead end, or can we see this through?’” Dr. Robertson recalled.
Glitch by glitch, the researchers figured out how to fix the altered DNA…
“It’s kind of crazy that they were able to pull this off,” said Yonatan Chemla, a synthetic biologist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the study. “It’s a technically demanding tour de force.”
Meanwhile, at Harvard, Dr. Nyerges and his colleagues have encountered glitches of their own. “There’s a lot more in genomes than we thought,” he said. “We are still not great at designing biology.”
“Engineering,” “building from scratch,” “inventing,” “designing”… “Rewriting the code of life,” it turns out, sounds an awful lot like intelligent design."
EN&V
