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FORGET genetic engineering. The new idea is synthetic biology, an effort by engineers to rewire the genetic circuitry of living organisms.
The ambitious undertaking includes genetic engineering, the now routine insertion of one or two genes into a bacterium or crop plant. But synthetic biologists aim to rearrange genes on a much wider scale, that of a genome, or an organism's entire genetic code. Their plans include microbes modified to generate cheap petroleum out of plant waste, and, further down the line, designing whole organisms from scratch.
Synthetic biologists can identify a network of useful genes on their computer screens by downloading the gene sequences filed in DNA data banks. But a DNA molecule containing these various genes and their control elements would be a chain of hundreds of thousands of DNA units in length. Though human cells effortlessly duplicate a genome of three billion units, the longest piece of DNA synthesized so far is just 35,000 units long.
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., hope to take a giant stride in synthetic biology by creating...
