Genetic engineering has produced some amazing species. One type of corn has a gene from bacteria. The corn is safe for people to eat, but the plant poisons caterpillars that try to attack it.There’s also a salmon that grows to market weight in less than half the usual time of three years. It’s an Atlantic salmon with genes from a Pacific chinook salmon.
Inside a living cell, something remarkable is happening. A very tiny machine cuts the cell’s DNA. Next, the cell repairs the broken DNA, but the segment where the cut happened no longer works the same way. The tiny machine has edited the DNA—the code of life.
基因编辑技术—合成生物学的基本工具 Continue reading »
Everyone can see that, from birth through adolescence, humans get taller and their bones get longer. And then all th at stops around the end of the teen years. In the past, the mechanism of growth was a mystery. In the fourth century, there was a common belief that children’s natural character was hot and liquid, partly because of the blood that went into their creation. Thus, a physician to the Roman emperor believed that children grew because of their excessive heat. Twelve hundred years later, it was understood that food provided the material that allowed growth. A French physician, however, pointed out that even when sick children didn’t eat, they continued to grow.
