Hacking life: Scientists ‘recode’ DNA in step toward lab-made organisms

Untitled Document Millions of years of evolution gave life on earth a genetic dictionary with 64 words. Harvard University scientists thought they could do better. In an intriguing step toward lab-made organisms, they reported on Thursday that they created a complete bacterial genome with only 57 of those words — and freed up the deleted seven to have completely new meanings that, one day, could include new biological functions.

At first glance the advance seems abstruse, promising anodyne applications such as making genetically modified bacteria that resist viral infection. (Those infections are problematic for industries that use bacteria to synthesize chemicals and drugs, costing them billions of dollars a year.) But the experiment, published Thursday in Science, is also a significant step toward a much grander project: recoding life.

If this were literature rather than biology, the feat would be akin to replacing all 1,611 instances of the word “wand” in the “Harry Potter” series, plus all 464 “wizard”s and more, and finding that the books still made magical sense. The scientists believe that genomes don’t need all 64 of the words they...