Re: Dragons

On 31 Mar 2006 07:48:27 GMT, Earl <neptune@xxxxxx> wrote:


Here be dragons

Mar 30th 2006

| SAN MELITO
From The Economist print edition

With luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological pet


PAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe,
based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That
dream is a dragon in every home.

GeneDupe's business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though,
the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a
range of entirely new animals?or, rather, of really quite old
animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was
only in the imagination.

Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe's team
of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to
the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call ?virtual
cell biology?.

Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about
processing information?in one case electronic; in the other,
biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software
model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail.
That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts
list?mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic
reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly,
and so on.


<snip>

Oh, wait until the gods hear about this. Remember how
pissed off they were when humans got fire? Strapping
Prometheus to a mountain and having an eagle continually
rip out his perpetually regenerating liver and all that? It
sounds like they were serious to me.

I presume the new monsters will be covered by the
current laws against animal abuse?


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