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Designer Genes
Drew Endy uses DNA to make new and improved versions of life.
Words By Rebecca Cathcart
When Drew Endy envisions the future, he sees giant gourds engineered to grow into four-bedroom, two-bathroom houses. He sees people alerted to nascent tumors in their bodies by internal biological sensors, and cars fueled by bacteria-produced gasoline. Endy, 37, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field that combines biology, chemistry, and engineering to remake biological systems to act according to human design. In other words, he’s a little like God, if God were a geek.
For Endy, who has roots in civil and environmental engineering, biology offers the most sophisticated building materials in the world, potentially far more useful than anything created by modern technology. Endy is attempting to create a biological programming language by identifying, cataloging, and standardizing small sequences of DNA that tell a cell to perform a specific task.
After joining the faculty at MIT, in 2004, Endy co-founded the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, an open-source catalogue of DNA segments with specific functions, such as those that make DNA strands fold into shapes like microscopic origami or cause cells to change color. These “BioBrick” parts, as Endy calls them, are fitted with special links at either end where they may be easily connected with other DNA segments, much in the manner of lego blocks. The segments snap together to form more complex instructions, so that scientists can manipulate exactly what task a cell performs. “We’ve started to collect genetic words that speak to the cell and tell it to do something,” he says. For example, Endy’s colleague Jay Keasling has found a way to reengineer E. coli so that they naturally produce an anti-malaria drug. Soon, huge vats of bacteria will be making the medicine, at a fraction of the current cost…
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