Designer Life

摘要

Last year, some 250 engineers, computer scientists, and biologists gathered at MIT for the first conference in a new field called synthetic biology. Their common goal: designing and building from scratch artificial biological systems such as cells or microorganisms that can do anything from producing drugs to cleaning up pollution. But conference goers agreed that to achieve such a goal, they will need better tools for synthesizing the long stretches of DNA required to build the synthetic organisms' genomes.