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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

What I always think would be a cool device (science fiction of course), would be one which you can give DNA code (be it copied from an existing creature, modified by someone, or computer generated), and then the machine produces the organism from that DNA code.

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>> you can give DNA code ... and then the machine produces the organism from that DNA code

My wife and I managed to do it a couple of times. Not that hard.

At this point, it's just a matter of how tediously you want to do the work to become famous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium

Venter's doing it right now.

I admire Venter's ability to withstand years of toil and criticism to prove something that is absolutely fucking obvious.

Given enough time and energy, you can build an organism from scratch. Of course, Venter's still pretty far away from that goal. But I suspect he will succeed; we all know there are none but technical barriers.

it's not a general solution, but there's:

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5838/632.abstract

Not all DNA would encode an organism, so sometimes you'd just end up with a goo of proteins and amino acids, or less. Still sounds like a cool machine.

Of course. Just like if you 3D print objects, some designs might print objects that are totally useless or would collapse, or if you compile C++ code, some code may give errors. Of course it will have to create a goo for bogus DNA, otherwise something would be wrong with the machine. The trick will be to find the DNA that prints real and interesting organisms :D

That assumes that DNA always means exactly the same thing for every organism, which - AFAIR - is not true. Information about the organism is encoded both in the DNA and the workings mechanism that uses it to construct proteins.

this (kinda) happens already - algorithm would be along the lines of - take existing DNA - splice with added DNA code - run PCR - insert DNA into a host cell with minimal own DNA - allow it to Grow. The Craig Venter Institute pioneered this.

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