Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về y học được đăng trên tạp chí y học Wertheim cung cấp cho các bạn kiến thức về ngành y đề tài: Hand-made biology. | Petsko Genome Biology 2010 11 124 http 2010 11 6 124 w Genome Biology COMMENT L__ Hand-made biology Gregory A Petsko But tonight we shall hurl the gauntlet of science into the frightful face of death itself. Young Frankenstein 1974 It s alive It s ALIVE . Oh in the name of God Now I know what it feels like to BE God Frankenstein 1931 Craig Venter would never be Central Casting s first choice to play Dr Frankenstein. And I can t see Hamilton Smith as Igor either. But when these two genome biologists and their coworkers announced in the May 20th issue of Science that they had created a bacterium one would have been forgiven for thinking based on the language they used and the turgid - even hysterical -reports in the press that they were auditioning for the parts. Here is the opening paragraph of the account of their work in The Economist a publication not customarily given to hyperbole In the end there was no castle no thunderstorm and definitely no hunchbacked cackling lab assistant. Nevertheless Craig Venter Hamilton Smith and their colleagues have done for real what Mary Shelley merely imagined. On May 20th in the pages of Science they announced that they had created a living creature. But did they Is their achievement creation in the literal and Frankensteinian sense of the word the action or process of bringing something into existence or is it something else entirely And if it is something else is it still as monumental as some people and the authors themselves claim In case you were in a coma and missed it here s a brief summary of what they did. They took a host strain that of the small free-living bacterium Mycoplasma capricolum and deleted the genes for its own restriction enzymes this would correspond to the cadaver in the Frankenstein tale . The restriction enzyme genes were deleted so that Correspondence petsko@ Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center Brandeis University Waltham MA 02454-9110 USA 2 BioMed .
