When geneticist Ronald Davis first suggested a decade ago that his colleagues try to create artificial yeast chromosomes and install them in a living cell, Jef Boeke didn't think much of the idea. Davis, who is at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, was known as a visionary. He proposed that a lab-made yeast would be the next step in the then-emerging field of synthetic biology. But Boeke couldn't see the point of replicating what nature had already made, especially because designing and synthesizing a 12.5-million-base genome seemed onerous, or even impossible. As Boeke listened to Davis's talk at a major yeast genetics meeting in 2004 in Seattle, he says, "I remember thinking 'Why on Earth would you want to do that?'"
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