Are We Cutting Off Our GM Nose to Spite Our

News today that a federal judge has rejected the approval of GM sugar beets by the USDA.  The ruling stated that the government should have done an environmental impact statement, and is similar to a ruling two years ago that led to halting the planting of GM alfalfa.  As in that case, according to the New York Times, "the plaintiffs in the [sugar beet] lawsuit said they would press to ban planting of the biotech beets, arguing that Judge White's decision effectively revoked their approval and made them illegal to grow outside of field trials."  The concern voiced by the plaintiffs, and recognized by the judge, is that pollen from the GM beets might spread transgenes that contaminate GM-free beets.

A few other tidbits from the article: sugar beets now supply about half the US sugar demand, and it seems that GM sugar beets account for about 95% of the US crop (I cannot find any data on the USDA site to support the latter claim).  A spokesman for the nation's largest sugar beet processor claims that food companies, and consumers, have completely accepted sugar from the modified beets -- as they should, because it's the same old sugar molecule. 

I got lured into spending most of my day on this because I noticed that the Sierra Club was one of the plaintiffs.  This surprised me, because the Sierra Club is less of a noisemaker on biotech crops than some of the co-plaintiffs, and usually focuses more on climate issues.  Though there is as yet no press release, digging around the Sierra Club site suggests that the organization wants all GM crops to be tested and evaluated with an impact statement before approval.  But my surprise also comes in part because the best review I can find of GM crops suggests that their growing use is coincident with a substantial reduction in soil loss, carbon emissions, energy use, water use, and overall climate impact -- precisely the sort of technological improvement you might expect the Sierra Club to support.  The reductions in environmental impact -- which range from 20% to 70%, depending on the crop -- come from "From Field to Market" (PDF) published earlier this year by the Keystone Alliance, a diverse collection of environmental groups and companies.  Recall that according to USDA data GM crops now account for about 90% of cotton, soy, and corn.  While the Keystone report does not directly attribute the reduction in climate impacts to genetic modification, a VP at Monsanto recently made the connection explicit (PDF of Kevin Eblen's slides at the 2009 International Farm Management Congress).  Here is some additional reporting/commentary.

So I find myself being pulled into exploring the cost/benefit analysis of biotech crops sooner than I had wanted.  I dealt with this issue in Biology is Technology by punting in the afterword:
 

The broader message in this book is that biological technologies are beginning to change both our economy and our interaction with nature in new ways.  The global acreage of genetically modified (GM) crops continues to grow at a very steady rate, and those crops are put to new uses in the economy every day.  One critical question I avoided in the discussion of these crops is the extent to which GM provides an advantage over unmodified plants.  With more than ten years of field and market experience with these crops in Asia and North and South America, the answer would appear to be yes.  Farmers who have the choice to plant GM crops often do so, and presumably they make that choice because it provides them a benefit.  But public debate remains highly polarized.  The Union of Concerned Scientists recently released a review of published studies of GM crop yields in which the author claimed to "debunk" the idea that genetic modification will "play a significant role in increasing food production"  The Biotechnology Industry Organization responded with a press release claiming to "debunk" the original debunking.  The debate continues.

Obviously we will all be talking about biotech crops for years to come.  I don't see how we are going to address the combination of 1) the need for more biomass for fuel and materials, 2) the mandatory increase in crop yields necessary to feed human populations, and 3) the need to reduce our climatic impacts, without deploying biotech crops at even larger scales than we have so far.  But I am also very aware that nobody, but nobody, truly understands how a GM organism will behave when released into the wild.

We do live in interesting times.

NYT on Systems Biology, Eric Schadt, and Sage Bionetworks

The Times is running a nice profile piece on Eric Schadt and his work at Rosetta and now Sage Bionetworks.

Biodesic evaluated systems biology investments for a large organization about 18 months ago, and Schadt's approach makes more sense to me -- by far -- than anything else we looked at.  I sat in on the pitch that Schadt and Stephen Friend made to that sameorganization, and it was crystal clear to me that Sage -- now residing at the Hutch here in Seattle -- should be on the receiving end of piles of money.  The stacks of Nature Group publications Schadt is accumulating suggest he is on to something, and it appears that his methods can be used to make predictions about the behaviors of complex networks.  Time and experimentation will tell, of course.  The open source aspect is a huge bonus.

Schadt's move to Pacific Biosciences is interesting because during his talk he suggested that genome sequencing provides enough information about variation to fuel his statistical methods for predicting interactions not just between genes but between tissues -- he is working at the level of describing the behavior of networks of networks.  It seems he will now have access to plenty of data.

Data and References for Longest Published sDNA

Various hard drive crashes have several times wiped out my records for the longest published synthetic DNA (sDNA).  I find that I once again need the list of references to finish off the edits for the book.  I will post them in the open here so that I, and everyone else, will always have access to them.

Year	Length	Refs
1979	207	Khorana (1979)
1990	2100	Mandecki (1990)
1995	2700	Stemmer (1995)
2002	7500	Cello (2002)
2004.4	14600	Tian (2004)
2004.7	32000	Kodumal (2004)
2008	583000	Gibson (2008)

1979
Total synthesis of a gene
HG Khorana
Science 16 February 1979:
Vol. 203. no. 4381, pp. 614 - 625
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/203/4381/614

1990
A totally synthetic plasmid for general cloning, gene expression and mutagenesis in Escherichia coli
Wlodek Mandecki, Mark A. Hayden, Mary Ann Shallcross and Elizabeth Stotland
Gene Volume 94, Issue 1, 28 September 1990, Pages 103-107
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T39-47GH99S-1J&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=84ca7779ff1489d5e18082b9ecb80683

1995
Single-step assembly of a gene and entire plasmid from large numbers of oligodeoxyribonucleotides
Willem P. C. Stemmer, Andreas Crameria, Kim D. Hab, Thomas M. Brennanb and Herbert L. Heynekerb
Gene Volume 164, Issue 1, 16 October 1995, Pages 49-53
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T39-3Y6HK7G-66&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=83620e335899881aac712a720396b8f2

2002
Chemical Synthesis of Poliovirus cDNA: Generation of Infectious Virus in the Absence of Natural Template
Jeronimo Cello, Aniko V. Paul, Eckard Wimmer
Science 9 August 2002: Vol. 297. no. 5583, pp. 1016 - 1018
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1072266

2004
Accurate multiplex gene synthesis from programmable DNA microchips
Jingdong Tian, Hui Gong, Nijing Sheng, Xiaochuan Zhou, Erdogan Gulari, Xiaolian Gao & George Church
Nature 432, 1050-1054 (23 December 2004)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7020/full/nature03151.html

Total synthesis of long DNA sequences: Synthesis of a contiguous 32-kb polyketide synthase gene cluster
Sarah J. Kodumal, Kedar G. Patel, Ralph Reid, Hugo G. Menzella, Mark Welch, and Daniel V. Santi
PNAS November 2, 2004 vol. 101 no. 44 15573-15578
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/44/15573.abstract

2008
Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome
Daniel G. Gibson, Gwynedd A. Benders, Cynthia Andrews-Pfannkoch, Evgeniya A. Denisova, Holly Baden-Tillson, Jayshree Zaveri, Timothy B. Stockwell, Anushka Brownley, David W. Thomas, Mikkel A. Algire, Chuck Merryman, Lei Young, Vladimir N. Noskov, John I. Glass, J. Craig Venter, Clyde A. Hutchison, III, Hamilton O. Smith
Science 29 February 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5867, pp. 1215 - 1220
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1151721

Mood Hacking at The World Economic Forum

(Update: see "Revisiting Mood Hacking with Scents", 3 December 2009.)

We are all familiar with the aromas used by stores in the hopes of motivating consumer frenzy.  Walk into some establishments and you may feel as if you have been smacked with a fragrant bunch of flowers.  Or possibly a fragrant leather shoe.  Maybe this actually encourages people to spend money.  It usually just makes me sneeze.

But what if the general strategy of behavior modification via perfumes of one kind or another really does work?  At the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, there was an explicit attempt to influence discussions through the use of custom scents designed for the occassion.

Here is a short excerpt from "Davos Aromas Deodorize Subprime Stench, Charm Dimon, Kissinger", by A. Craig Copetas (Bloomberg News):

"I know a lot of people think this is foolish,'' says Toshiko Mori, chairwoman of Harvard University's architecture department and one of the WEF delegates who initiated the perfume project. ``But the global economy is in dire straits and we must improve the quality of human spirits. Perfuming is a powerful tool in a much broader discourse. The fragrances will help us reach economic and political solutions at Davos.''

Here is CNN's take: "Smelly Davos unveils new world odor."  Ha.

The reader might imagine a room full of national security professionals debating the merits and ethics of this "technology".  We see two camps emerge.  The first group is shocked -- shocked! -- that biochemical warfare is being brought indoors to induce in captains of industry and policy makers a mood of compromise.  The second group notes that all it took to hack the mood of Boris Yeltsin was an open bottle of vodka.  The latter strategy has, of course, been used for millennia.

Hacking a the mood of an entire room full of people at once is an interesting twist, though.  What happens when someone modifies airborne rhinoviruses to express neuroactive peptides?  (See my post on iGEM 2008: "Surprise -- the Future is Here Already".)  Science fiction gave us the answer long ago.  Isaac Asimov had his characters wearing anti-viral filters in their nostrils even in his early stories.  Seems like filters with sufficiently small pores might make it hard to breathe.  And what happens if you sneeze?  "Ouch!" or "Ewww", I imagine.

Anyway, how would we even know that mood hacking was occurring?  Aside from simply noting changes in behavior, or getting, um, wind of the threat via human intelligence, we would have to measure any chemical or biological weapon directly.  But before pulling out the Tricorder and identifying a threat, we would first have to be constantly monitoring our environment in order to get a baseline of environmental signals.  So, we have already struck out.  No such monitoring is really happening.  We are just cherry picking a few things that are easy to see.  Oh, and still no Tricorder.

If the mood altering mechanism was delivered via a virus, we would have to not just monitor the number of viruses of any given species in the air, but also be sequencing all of them, all the time.  Again, we are striking out.

I have a hard time imagining that viral mood hacking threats are going to show up any time soon, but then we have no means of knowing either way.  Perhaps such things are already about.  How can you be sure you aren't part of "The Giving Plague"?

"The New Biofactories"

(Update: McKinsey seems to have pulled the whole issue from the web, which is too bad because there was a lot of good stuff in it.  The text of my contribution can be found below.)

I have a short essay in a special edition of the McKinsey Quarterly, What Matters.  My piece is waaaay back at the end of the printed volume, and all the preceding articles are well worth a look.  Other essayists include Steven Chu, Hal Varian, Nicholas Stern, Kim Stanley Robinson, Yochai Benkler, Vinod Khosla, Arianna Huffington, Joseph Nye, and many more.  Good company.

Here is the essay: "The New Biofactories" (PDF), Robert Carlson, What Matters, McKinsey & Company, 2009.

Advice for Future iGEM Teams

I'm giving a short talk to the University of Washington iGEM interest group tonight based on my experience watching the competition from the beginning and as a judge for the last couple of years.

The judges are given a long list of criteria for the various medals and awards.  The list has grown longer and more involved -- if the trend holds next year I expect it to be even more complicated.  There are many more teams than judges, so each of us sees only a small fraction of the teams in person on the first day of the Jamboree.  The only way we can keep things fair (and keep the teams straight in our heads) is to follow the judging criteria very closely.  We have a checklist.

It is important to remember in what follows that my academic training is in experimental physics, and I spend most of my time today trying to build stuff out of DNA.  I don't have anything against elegant and cool models; I simply groove more on elegant and cool atoms.  I speak only for myself and not for any other of the judges or organizers.

Here is what I plan to say this evening:

1. You need to make easy for the judges to understand your objective and your design.
2. Web pages can be too cool.  A rough rule of thumb: the cooler the web page is, the harder it is to understand.  A cool web page may be full of information, but as a judge it is the baud rate I care about.
3. Fun is good.  Demonstrating actual learning is better.  Data trumps everything.
4. In my experience, the more equations in your model, the less likely you will produce experimental data.  I find complexity as distracting in my own work as I do when I have something like 15 minutes to figure out the theoretical details of an iGEM project.  Keep it simple!
5. Find a mentor to help tailor your story to your customers, namely the judges.  This past year the judges were a mixture of academics and industry types -- biologists, engineers, computer scientists, physicists; theorists, experimentalists, hackers.  All probably have PhDs in something or other, which means we are used to rapidly parsing stories that are packaged more like papers in Science and Nature than like facespace/mybook/twitterwikirama/whatever.  Those things may be the future of science for all I know, but your customers (the judges) don't play that game -- we are fogeys as far as you are concerned.  You have to market to us.
6. Follow the directions!  Follow the checklist.  Make sure your DNA is to spec (e.g. meets the Biobrick(TM) standards).  Make sure it is in the Registry.  Get everything in on time.  Sometimes the organizers and judges screw up this part -- the way to resolve complaints is with reason and your own checklist.  No whinging.
7. Here is a suggestion I made to the organizers after the last competition.  Even if they don't implement it, you should.  Everyone in the competition has completed some sort of laboratory course requiring basic experimental write-ups.  Make sure your web page has a basic lab write-up, no clicking or hunting required. You will do better if the judges don't have to spend even thirty seconds trying to figure out if you have actual data and where it might be hiding on your wiki, especially if other pages are better designed and easier to read.  If I recall from my student days, those write-ups go something like this, mostly in this order: "1. Here is what we wanted to do and why.  2. Here is what we did.  3. Model.  4. Data.  5. Conclusion."  Bonus: if it didn't work, why not?  iGEM and the Biobricks Foudation both need a failure archive.

Good luck next year!

Garage Biology Project: Melamine-detection Bugs

Worried about whether your yogurt is safe?  Drop in some of  Meredith Patterson's home-brew bugs and see if they turn green.  The AP has a short story about Patterson and DIYBio: "Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home".  No surprise that it is a bit short on details.

This story made it as far (temporarily) as the front page of The Huffington Post, which I find interesting.  I wonder whether the editors put it there out of genuine interest or to scare the crap out of their readers.

It's only been eight years since I first speculated about garage biology (PDF), and only three since the topic appeared in Wired (Splice it yourself).  iGEM has only been around since 2004.  Biology, for the most part, remains Open (See, "Thoughts on Open Biology"):

As in 2000, I remain today most interested in maintaining, andenhancing, the ability to innovate.  In particular, I feel that safe and secure innovation is likely to be best achieved through distributed research and through distributed biological manufacturing.  By "Open Biology" I mean access to the tools and skills necessary to participate in that innovation and distributed economy.

I find myself a bit surprised to feel a bit surprised that this is this is all going just as I expected (PDF).  (Aside: if there isn't a name for that, there should be; I predicted X, and not only am I surprised that it is coming true, I am surprised to feel surprised that it is coming true...because I really believed it was going to come true.  I think.)  From the AP story:

[Patterson]  learned about genetic engineering by reading scientific papers and getting tips from online forums. She ordered jellyfish DNA for a green fluorescent protein from a biological supply company for less than $100. And she built her own lab equipment, including a gel electrophoresis chamber, or DNA analyzer, which she constructed for less than $25, versus more than $200 for a low-end off-the-shelf model.

Frankly, I don't know whether to feel relieved or uneasy.  That ambivalence will probably characterize my response to this technology from here on out.  Whether we like it or not, we are about to find out what role garage biology will play in our physical and economic security (Journal article, PDF).

Data: Definitive(?) Evidence of Amplification and Accelerated Warming at the Poles

The ongoing American Geophysical Union meeting is full of cheery news.  According to a report in the IHT, more than 2 trillion tons of landlocked ice have melted since 2003 in Greenland, Antarctica, and Alaska.  Of that, more than half occurred in Greenland, and satellite measurements confirm that the melting is accelerating.

The new results follow on James Hansen's earlier work based on data, rather than models, suggesting that both warming and sea level rise are likely happen faster than the IPCC consensus estimates (see "It's time to Invest in Water Wings"), because the IPCC models explicitly exclude the effect of ice sheet movement and landlocked ice melting.

It gets even better.  Reduced sea ice coverage is also now strongly affecting the thermal balance of the poles:

As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the autumn. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are 6 degrees Fahrenheit to 10 degrees (3.5 degrees to 6 degrees) warmer than they were in the 1980s.

Warming of the land and sea are coupled: "The loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane," itself a potent greenhouse gas, according to Julienne Stroeve, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.  (See my previous posts: "Methane Time Bomb" and "Update".)

With respect to the anomolously high Arctic temperatures, The Independent's Steve Connor wonders "Has the Arctic melt passed the point of no return?":

The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.

The coupling of land and sea warming constitute a feedback mechanism that threatens to create runaway warming and increased methane emissions, which will only make things worse.  Only more data will help resolve any remaining uncertainty.  While we gather that data, our time to fiddle is running out.

iGEM 2008: Surprise -- The Future is Here Already.

I'm back from a weekend at MIT serving as a judge for the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition.  Here are a few thoughts on the competition.

The "international" flavor continues to strengthen.  Of the six finalists, three were from the U.S., two from Europe, and one from Asia.  There were 85 teams registered, almost all of whom showed up.  I was hoping for more biofuels/energy projects, but perhaps that fad is already past.

The top three teams were (here are the full results): 1) Slovenia 2) Freiburg 3) Caltech.

First, a couple of slightly blurry iPhotos (when the hell is Apple going to upgrade that camera?):

 Tom Knight receives the BioBrick from the 2007 winner, Peking University.

A collective dance party while the competitors wait for the judges.

Tom Knight awards the BioBrick to the 2008 winners, Slovenia.

Several of the 2008 projects implement ideas that have appeared in science fiction stories and in my own speculations about the future of biological technologies:

UCSF characterized a fusion protein that enables epigenetic control of gene expression through chromatin silencing.  This, in effect, gives the user (which could be the cell itself) a new control knob for building memory circuits in eukaryotes.  I seem to recall that this is the basic innovation in Greg Bear's Blood Music that brings about the end of the world through Green Goo.  Go UCSF!

Caltech and NYMU-Taipei (check out the killer Wiki) both modified commensal E. coli strains to serve as therapeutics.  Caltech built a bunch of new functionality into the probiotic strain Nissle 1917, including microbicidal circuits, Vitamin B supplements, and lactase production (big kudos to Christina Smolke, here).  Taipei built a "Bactokidney" for people with kidney failure: cells that attach to the lining of the small intestine and absorb nasty substances that would otherwise need to be removed via dialysis.  These are both very cool ideas.

Seeing these projects brought back shades of a scenario published in Bio-era's "Genome Synthesis and Design Futures: Implications for the U.S. Economy".  (I wrote the original story, which was less complicated but slightly more nefarious than the Bio-era version, in 2005 as a short, provocative piece of a larger report for a TLA -- a three letter agency.)  Almost all the technology described below has been published in bits and pieces -- fortunately, it has not yet been put together in one microbe.

In 2008, the North Korean government launches a secret program to develop biological tools that can be used to pacify target populations for crowd control or military purposes. North Korea's research draws on Soviet work on modifying pathogens to express mood-altering peptides, and the demonstration by U.S. scientists at the National Institutes of Health that common commensal strains of E. coli could be modified to secrete specialized peptides in human intestines.  Modifying the same strain used by the NIH, available in an over-the-counter probiotic pill, the North Koreans secretly produce an organism that produces peptide hormones easily absorbed through the intestinal wall.

With further modifications to allow the peptides to enter the brain, the new strain produces a calming, almost sedative, effect on colonized individuals. Combined with a genetic circuit that confers both antibiotic resistance and upregulation of the peptides upon exposure to a chemical that can be dispersed like teargas, these modifications enable the government to pacify crowds in times of crisis. The E. coli can be distributed via food and water to target populations.

To maintain the presence of the genetic circuit within the population, the new strain is equipped with an antibiotic resistance mechanism from V. cholera that causes plasmids containing the entire genetic circuit, including the regulatory genes and the mood modification genes, to be horizontally transferred to other bacteria upon treatment with common antibiotics.

In 2009, Pyongyang uses military forces to suppress a widening political uprising against the regime. Reports of a "pacifying gas" quickly emerge, raising allegations about the use of chemical weapons. U.S. intelligence agencies claim that North Korea has used a novel combination of biological and chemical weapons against rioters, leading the U.S. to declare that Pyongyang has violated the international treaty on bioweapons. Pacifist biohackers undertake to recreate the microbe , or to invent new versions to use as "peace weapons" against armies.

When a U.S.-led coalition attempts to impose an economic embargo against North Korea, the Chinese government uses its military to secure supply lines to North Korea. A military standoff between U.S. and Chinese forces ensues.

Here is the original inspiration: "Toward a live microbial microbicide for HIV: Commensal bacteria secreting an HIV fusion inhibitor peptide". (I'd completely forgotten that I blogged the original paper.)

Slovenia won (again) with "Immunobricks" by engineering new vaccines. The technology they used forms the basis of arguments about rapid, distributed vaccine production we made in Genome Synthesis and Design Futures (Section 4.3, in particular), which I've also written about extensively here on this blog, and which will show up in my book.  Yet all of a sudden it's real, all the more so because it was an iGEM project.

From Slovenia's Wiki abstract:

Using synthetic biology approaches we managed to assemble functional "immunobricks" into a designer vaccine with a goal to activate both innate and acquired immune response to H. pylori. We successfully developed two forms of such designer vaccines. One was based on modifying H. pylori component (flagellin) such that it can now be recognized by the immune system. The other relied upon linking H. pylori components to certain molecules of the innate immune response (so called Toll-like receptors) to activate and guide H. pylori proteins to relevant compartments within the immune cell causing optimal innate and acquired immune response. Both types of vaccines have been thoroughly characterized in vitro (in test tubes or cells) as well as in vivo (laboratory mice) exhibiting substantial antibody response. Our strategy of both vaccines' design is not limited to H. pylori and can be applied to other pathogens. Additionally, our vaccines can be delivered using simple and inexpensive vaccination routes, which could be suitable also in third world countries.

If you've read this far into the post, you should definitely spend some time on Slovenia's Wiki.

Here's the short, pithy version: There is presently no vaccine for H. pylori.  Between June and October this year, seven undergraduates built and tested three kinds of brand new vaccines against H. pylori.  (They also put a whole mess of Biobrick parts into the Registry, which means those parts are all in the public domain.)

Yes, yes -- it's true, getting something to work in a mouse and in mammalian cell culture is a long way from getting it to work in humans, or even in ferrets.  But the skill level and speed of this work should make everyone sit up and take notice.

So it is worth pondering the broader implications of these projects.

The Slovenian team clearly has access to very high quality labs and protocols.  Mammalian cell culture can be very fiddly unless you know what you are doing and have the right equipment (I speak from painful experience, lo those many years ago in grad school).  The Caltech and Taipei teams also clearly have a great deal of support and mentoring.  Yet while bashing DNA and growing E. coli are not particularly hard, the design and testing of the coli projects is very impressive.

Despite all the support and money evident in the projects, there is absolutely no reason this work could not be done in a garage.  And all of the parts for these projects are now available from the Registry.

Over the past couple of years, in various venues, I have tried to point out both the utility and inevitability of proliferating biological technologies.  iGEM 2008 drives home the point yet again.  In particular, the ability to rapidly create vaccines and biological therapeutics points the way to increased participation by "amateurs", whether the professionals (and policy makers...and security types) are ready or not.  I'm also thinking back to "peer reviews" in which I was excoriated for suggesting this kind of work was within the reach of people with minimal formal training.  Because, really, you need a PhD, and an NIH grant, and tenure, to even think of taking on anything like a synthetic vaccine.  Oh, wait...

Although I've predicted in writing that this sort of thing would happen, I frankly expected practical implementation of both the rapid, synthetic vaccines and the modified commensal bacteria to take a few more years. Yet undergraduates are already building these things as summer projects.

It didn't really hit me until I started writing this post earlier this afternoon, but as I ponder the results from this year's iGEM only one thought comes to mind: "Holy crap -- hold on to your knickers."

The world is changing very, very quickly.

The Moon in HD

Super.  Duper.  Cool.