issue this report in december of that year and you can download this from the white house website. interesting. i think for a government report, i couldn't have asked for a better job. they talk about the strengths and the potential and some of the dangers with this. should be deregulated, should it not be, and talks about new things in science that should be funded, for example, to put kill switches into synthetic organisms so they can't survive outside the lab. so i think this is government committees -- at best been watched very carefully and you can get the more complete version of this. enjoyed at your leisure. thank you very much. [applause]

[inaudible] those who have questions to come on up. you can start it off. >> when you make your synthetic cell, what did you put the dean into? it was an existing cell that was it programs did, the cell you're looking for? >> so, exactly what we did, we put it into the other so which is what we're using as our recent in cell. and it converted into what was coded for by the new chromosome. >> so the idea that dna is a digital code that can be downloaded and so on, how well

does that extend to more complex organisms into the importance of how traits are inherited and how dna is expressed? >> we are not ready to beam humans across the universe, although i somewhat jokingly talk about as much in them being sequenced 14 years ago, it's been broadcast into space now for quite a while. so easy an army of j. craig venter's coming back, don't be too shocked. [laughter] but obviously even quote simple single eukaryotic cells have a lot more levels of regulation. but one thing you should be cognizant of is epigenetic phenomenon are still based on genetics. everything in the sale is coded for initially i the dna. the properties of the proteins and processes get their own

specifications from that, and as a sales get more complex, those processes get more complex. there's an effort now, a european effort, to try to make the entire genome in a massive effort sort of like the public genome effort over the next five years to remake east, replacing all of the other chromosomes one at a time, but because everything evolves from the genetic code as soon as it gets read, the sale remakes everything that it is going to need. yeast and your carry-on going to be proper more simplistic. >> is protein decay similar to atomic decay? and does the rate of decay for certain proteins affect the use within the cell? >> it's similar in the sense that different proteins to have their own half-lives, determined

largely by the amino acid. and yes, that some have a half-life of seconds, some minutes, some hours. and that very much determines their processing as part of how cells are regulated, something that the previous speaker was referring to as epigenetic phenomenon. so some proteins, if they are ready with her or hormones, they get degraded very fast and you remake them as they are needed. so the half-life of all the different proteins in your cells varies across the spectrum of all 20,000 somewhat proteins. >> great, thank you. your story of a single base pair change triggered a question on what you might think the limits of computational biology could be, which is when, if ever, do

you think we would be able to computationally predict the statistical impact of a single base pay or change on the phenotype of? >> so, i think it's a great question. i devote not an insignificant part of the book talked about all the attempts to digitally model life, and most of the studies in fact a base on our sequencing of the micro-plasm genomes, and the group at stanford has gotten closer than anybody else but it involves about 125 different algorithms and a lot of complex computation. we've been trying to see if their data can model what we are trying to make with this minimal cell. and it turns out you can't model it in the computer if you don't know the function because we're in this empirical face. and taliban of the function of all the proteins, you can't model is there actually. but i think people are getting

closer than have in the past. as soon as the data sets are fairly complete, modeling will be pretty straightforward. we hope it can be used to simplify the next stages of processing so you can get very scientific and know if you make this change can make it will work and how this function. we're a long way from that because of all the unknowns in biology. >> how long? >> how long? for understanding the human genome, that's going to be the rest of this entry at that lev level. >> thank you for your work. two questions, one very brief. what's your favorite science fiction inspiration? and what, if any, quantum physics are being done with this quote spooky effects in honor of following? >> nothing specifically for halloween, but i give you some hints in the book.

i quote from isaac adams off, the three laws of robotics are quoted in the, plus the zero law. so that's not a bad -- that's not a bad place to start. i think a lot of people who work in science, what seems like science fiction 50 years ago now seems like conservative ideas. >> i have two questions. the first is, all of those 50 genes you mentioned that are necessary for life but his functions we don't know, what percent of them are they of all the genes in synthetic life? and second is, but those 50 genes, are any of them similar to genes of other organisms speak with both good question that i don't want to give a precise number because then you would know how many genes it would take for life, but on the order of 10%.

and yes, initially when we had all these unknown genes in the first genomes we sequenced, a lot of people speculated that they were going to be species specific genes and not very important. it turns out they were highly considered across all branches of life in most cases but we still don't know what they are because you can't get a grant to study and unknown gene. so it's kind of an oxymoron how we approach assigns the you have to know the answer before you can study it. but it will come out of these studies because we'l we will bee to decipher its function in the context of the synthetic cell. >> thank you so much. two or three years ago i read an article about lincoln labs at mit, and i think the head investigator there was todd rider. he was developing something called draco, like the harry potter character, and apparently

was able to look at the dna of any virus and create a queue or. they had shown that it worked i think 10 different completely unrelated viruses. and i apologize if it's poor form to ask about someone else's work but i've been scouring the internet for more news about it for two years, finding nothing. and i was wondering if you are familiar with it and if you had a few on it speak with no. i've not heard of it, which means it probably didn't really work. or you'd be able to find lots about it on the internet. >> for someone like me who has no background in biology and who is kind of maybe a little bit of natural paranoid about the dangers of synthetic biology, the future of downloading things, what reassuring words do you have to say -- [laughter] >> well, you know, and as i

indicated not only in the book but in reality this is something we spend a lot of time and effort on. .. >> not just by the bush administration, but at the level of the white house to to decide whether the, our data should be classified or openly published. and not being a real fan of the bush administratio i