No, however, from what you thought! Biomedical engineers from Duke University in North Carolina announced via a paper in Nature that they created (for the first time) functional human muscle …
the mutations died; long live the mutations!!
The industry that has covered more than 1.81 million square kilometers of the planet’s arable land with genetically modified crops is at the center of a massive change. The improved …
Diagnosis of pocket
The passenger lost consciousness on the airplane during the flight. To his good fortune, his fellow traveler was Eric Topol. Topol is a cardiologist—but he didn’t perform chest compressions. He …
Genetic improvement
Those interested in reflecting on the “ethical risks” of the 3rd and 4th industrial / technological revolutions (and there are many such people, “experts” or not) should go ahead: it …
DIYbio: self-improvement in the 21st century
One would assume that biohackers are a marginal cosmopolitan phenomenon, some “geeks” here and there. Indeed, numerically speaking, biohackers may be few in number, for now. Ideologically, however, biohacking indicates …
The scientific epic
Anyone who thinks (or will come to think in the future) that the innovative recipe for genetic editing called Crispr/Cas-9 (see Cyborg 8: genetic cut-and-sew) is a pure product of …
DNA sequencer
It may look like a large photocopier, but it’s not. According to its specifications, Illumina’s HiSeq X machine can produce the complete sequence of 16 human genomes in every 3-day …
precision medicine: the personalization of medicine
The term “precision medicine” is relatively new and was mainly highlighted after 2011 thanks to a report by the U.S. national research council, which focused on the need for a …
3D printers
The generations that grew up in the 20th century were trained to use specific symbolic representations in encoding the world. Among these, the images of “construction” and “building” had a …
genetic cut-and-paste: the great deception
Think of a cinematic film. You identify a specific sequence of frames that you want to replace. If you have a film reel, you go and cut the celluloid, and …
genetic predisposition; no, thank you!
Are we our genes? A large part of the so-called “scientific community” continues to support this view, albeit using statistical tricks. DNA is our “book of life,” written with just …
Ephemeral genes
It is one of those scientific procedures that (with our limited minds) we would hardly consider truly “scientific”: first (some claim) they found the genes for A or B, and …