If you could build body parts from scratch with exquisite control (see main story), why not improve on what nature gave us? "One quickly gets into an area of science-fiction-like speculation/' says Patrick Guye of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team is laying the foundations for this to become a reality. In theory, he says, we can imagine creating a human organ for detecting magnetic fields -birds have such things, for example. But augmenting organs, rather than making entirely new ones, is within closer reach. Synthetic biology provides a rapidly increasing number of biological sensors that react to different stimuli. These could be inserted into tissues so that gene expression could be controlled by light alone, say, which may allow less invasive treatments.
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