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Attempting to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium

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1–10 of 22 posts

Re: Attempting to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium

#4
While full of interesting facts, this idea is so scarily bad it’s hard to justify.

If ginkgo has a theranos style meltdown this will be an article we can look back on and think “I guess they were telling us all along and we should have seen it”

Re: Attempting to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium

#5
Hey, a project I actually know about. Used to work in Kaisha Benjamin's lab (Endy Lab at Stanford). I remember all those bioinformatics to get the glucose inducible promoter. Back then at least, the promoter wasn't controllable enough. Currently, I'm actually vaguely helping with this project by synthesizing phage PH15 (building a high throughput DNA synthesis/assembly company right now). Can probably use the phage to package up DNA to transform S. epidermidis.

In general, I think microbiome engineering is super cool and should be explored more!

Re: Attempting to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium

#6

While full of interesting facts, this idea is so scarily bad it’s hard to justify. If ginkgo has a theranos style meltdown this will be an article we can look back on and think “I guess they were telling us all along and we should have seen it”

Not a ginkgo project

Re: Attempting to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium

#7
post #6

While full of interesting facts, this idea is so scarily bad it’s hard to justify. If ginkgo has a theranos style meltdown this will be an article we can look back on and think “I guess they were telling us all along and we should have seen it”

Not a ginkgo project

Not one of their projects, but published by their magazine.

If AWS had an industry magazine that proposed data centers could be run by well-trained dogs, I'd definitely sell my shares.

Synthetic biology safety needs to be taken more seriously than anything our society has ever invented. Removing synthetic organisms from of a lab can have such dire, irreversible consequences we can't even begin to predict them. Jurassic Park mixed Ice-9 from Vonnegut's 'Cats Cradle' is a near approximation of the possibility.

Re: Attempting to engineer microscopic insulin pumps out of a skin bacterium

#10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a ginkgo project

Not one of their projects, but published by their magazine. If AWS had an industry magazine that proposed data centers could be run by well-trained dogs, I'd definitely sell my shares. Synthetic biology safety needs to be taken more seriously than anything our society has ever invented. Removing synthetic organisms from of a lab can have such dire, irreversible consequences we can't even begin to predict them. Jurass…

Eh. Most people I see who are super concerned about synthetic biology safety aren't the people actually working on it (in contrast to things like AI, or even more innocuous technology like social media). That includes me. I've worked in synbio for >10yr and consistently the danger is overhyped by people who don't get it.

> dire, irreversible consequences we can't even begin to predict them

No, they're dire consequences that you can't predict, probably because you don't work in the field. There are lots of ways to predict what could happen.

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