The First Synthetic Cell

Yesterday, the creation of the first synthetic cell was announced by Craig Venter, one of the greatest biologists of our era. This is the first self-replicating organism on the planet whose parent is a computer.

After a fifteen year journey (during which he also decoded the human genome), Craig Venter's team successfully made a complete synthetic genome, transplanted it to a bacterial cell, and booted it up in the cell to produce a new species. The genome was designed on computers and created from four bottles of chemicals. Then, the chromosomes were assembled in yeast. One of the major obstacles was to boot up the genome in the bacterial cell, since the transplant chromosomes were rejected and destroyed by the recipient cells. Advances were made to remove restriction enzymes from recipient cells and insert chromosomes with methylated DNA in the cells.

Other problems in the project were debugging issues. Initially, the transplanted chromosomes did not support life because only one base pair was deleted. This led to the development of debugging programs that made the production of the life-supporting synthetic genome possible.

One interesting aspect of this genome is that it has watermarks embedded in it for identification. Using a specific code, the names of the authors and the website of the genome were spelled out in the genome.

This amazing breakthrough has vast implications. Firstly, it tells us about the basic recipes of life as well as the dynamic nature of it. It also provides technical advancements such as the production of vaccines and production of new and useful species, such as algae that can make oil out of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We can only begin to imagine what might come out of this astonishing revolution.

Computing a Theory of Everything

Stephen Wolfram has initiated an interesting approach in studying the physical universe. He tries to create our physical universe out of the much more diverse computation universe, the vast abstract universe of computation and mathematics.

Wolfram has created Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, two very powerful mathematical/computational tools. He is also the author of "A New Kind of Science" (which is available online). Wolfram has established a new kind of science (as he calls it) which examines the complexity of systems from very simple computational rules.

In his talk at TED, he outlines this idea and how it relates to our physical world, in the sense that our seemingly complex universe could be the product of simple rules which could be simulated in computers. Wolfram has done much research on this issue and has actually created universes that come very close to ours.

I personally believe that this approach is very valuable and successful. Our understanding of nature lies in understanding complexity in systems consisting of different parameters. Not only will this approach make contributions to theoretical physics (hopefully), but it will also allow us to understand much more complex systems such as those in biological organisms. Something as complex as the brain can only be studied from this approach.
As a matter of fact, a very interesting field named Computational Neuroscience is being established. Many mathematicians, programmers, neuroscientists, and physicists will come together to study the brain from a computational point of view. I personally cannot wait to see what will come out of this in the upcoming years.