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Scott, I listen to your

Scott, I listen to your podcasts so I can't be that much of a hater, but if you think for one second that there research scientists sitting around listening to your podcasts waiting for a new direction in their research, you'd be sorely, sorely mistaken. Movie and script plagiarism maybe, but scientific discovery influenced by 'the god machine'? I don't think so. I'm a molecular geneticist, and while you capture some great ideas (tracing back a gene's phylogeny looking for a common ancestor), the idea in practice is completely fictitious. Microfluidics, nano-assembally and high efficiency DNA synthesis are pushing the boundaries of what we can engineer on such a small scale, but the idea of a DNA synthesizing 'god machine' that can chain assemble billions of bases is the equivalent of a 10-year-old asking for a never ending ice-cream. A human/cow chimera as discussed in the research piece at the BBC has not been though of overnight, but is one of the basic premises of all stem cell research across the world. Australia has recently held a senate referendum based of cloning techniques that the public deem acceptable, and all technologies bar xeno-blastula chimera's were adopted. As in London, the populations acceptance of this technology is pretty much instantly ruled out die to the 'yuck' factor as discussed. I hope that some of these technologies do eventually come to the forefront of advancing our knowledge of the inner workings of the cell, but for the time being we'll still have to rely on old-hat restriction endonucleases. Andy C, yes. You could do this sort of in vivo protein response, but you'd want to at least be a couple of hundred years into the future to get the OK from the public. In a couple of hundred (thousand?) years I imaging that we will all be sporting some kinds of germ-line enhancements such as these, and the field of DNA-vector immunization provides a glimpse of what essentially creating a transgenic human cell could achieve. All you would need to do is get the vector stably inserted into the host cell (the bane of anyone working in this field is this trick alone) and then simply have the transgene under the control of a promoter that turns on in response to your stimulus of choice. Lots of work has been completed already on these sorts of problems for optimizing protein expression in cell culture, but the idea of getting it to work in humans is over the horizon. Scott, your plot is enough to keep this scientist listening, but taking the credit for other peoples work is a bit of a two edges sword, as per the comments in this post. Keep up the good work. cimera.