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It’s time to build a synthetic human genome, say a group of famous scientists in an article published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science.
With this lofty pitch for the “Human Genome Project-Write,” the group hopes to attract major funders and collaborators to synthesize the human genome by laying down DNA letters like bricks, rather than cutting or pasting them from existing genomes.
“It’s essentially a call to action,” Andrew Hessel, a researcher at the San Francisco software company Autodesk and one of the project’s leaders, told BuzzFeed News. “We are suggesting it’s time to consider a new genome project standing on the foundations of the Human Genome Project,” he added, referring to the $3 billion, decade-long effort to decode the billions of letters of the human genome that ended in 2003.
The project’s other leads include: sequencing pioneer George Church, a professor at Harvard University; Jef Boeke, a professor at New York University’s Langone Medical Center who is part of a project to synthesize a yeast genome; and Nancy Kelley, a New York lawyer...