Growth Assembly, a series by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Sascha Pohflepp.
They attempt to illustrate how synthetic biology might be used for the production of consumer goods.
Pigeon D’or, the fictional pigeon with gut bacteria engineered to produce soap, so that the pigeon defecates soap in city streets.
Synthetic biology was used to design and create a bacteria can modify the metabolism of pigeons, but has not been tested.
The Scatalog demonstrates how the gut bacteria E. coli could be engineered to indicate when a person is unhealthy or infected with different pathogens.
It was created in a collaboration between Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, James King and the Cambridge University iGEM 2009.
The Glowing Plant Project has recently crowdsourced funding for their attempt to create glowing plants
using luminescent luciferase from fireflies, and distribute seeds to their thousands of backers.
Colonies of E. coli designed to work as photo reactive film; they respond to red light by changing their color.
The two images reproduced here are a classic portrait of Albert Einstein and a "self-portrait" of E. coli in motion.
The transgenic goat Freckles; she produces milk containing a spider-silk protein, which can be extracted and spun into silk in the laboratory.
Spider silk is incredibly strong, but we have previously been unable to collect it in large quantities from spiders.
This was a slide in a presentation by Jamie Davis. The difference between using genetic material as we find it in nature,
and using genetic material that has been altered for reliable, predictable construction.
QUOTES THROUGH TIME
The discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.
Plato, Phaedrus, ~370 B.C.
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818.
There is grandeur in this view of life... that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859
The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as a creator, even in living nature, forming it eventually to his will. Man can at last succeed in a technology of living substance.
Jacques Loeb, 1890
We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges.
Filipo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, 1909
If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1953
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalogue, 1968
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
Richard Feynman, 1988
The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the world’s most frightening weapons.
CIA Office of Transnational Issues, “The Darker Bioweapons Future,” 2003
As creative as we become, and as industrious and as good as we are at designing and manufacturing living things, which we've been doing since the stone age - no matter how good we get at that, it's like calling a candle a supernova. A candle is not a super nova; it's not even in the same league. And we, as intelligent designers, are not in the same league as the "Intelligent Design" forces that started the whole shebang. We're not designing sub-atomic particles from scratch; we're not designing galaxies. We're really not even designing the basic idea of life; we're just manipulating it.
George Church, EDGE, 2006
This is going to mean as much for humankind in the next century as the domestication of plants and animals in improving the condition of humankind. This is an historic set of changes.
Major Kernel Jeffrey Boore, Genomics: Where Have We Come and Where Are We Going?, 2009
We’re anything but Godlike. I think the challenges are so overwhelming to all of us that we’re all trying to just use whatever new tools we can to try and change the future.
J. Craig Venter
What drives synthetic biology is not an attempt to save the planet or help humanity but an attempt to increase the bottom line for certain very large corporations.
Jim Thomas, ECT Group