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A “top secret" meeting of scientists was held at the Langone Medical Center on Halloween 2015. Their aim? To kickstart a new Human Genome Project and build a functional human genome from the base pairs up by 2026.
“There's only one grand challenge in synthetic biology. Only one. And it's to write a human genome. And we have to do that,” said Autodesk Fellow Andrew Hessel at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine 2016 conference.
Like the first Human Genome Project before it — which resulted in the first fully sequenced human genome — writing a human genome from scratch is an audacious goal. Hessel said a number of organizations are already writing DNA, and we can fabricate million-pair DNA constructs. But the human genome contains three billion base pairs.
We’re a long way from writing DNA on that scale.
“It took a year to design the yeast genome, even though there were barely any changes made to [it]. So, we need better design tools,” Hessel said.
Work on the yeast genome is the most advanced thing going on in synthetic biology...