Those interested in my upcoming talks may want to visit my main web site.I’ve started to post information about the talks, as well as bringing the archive of my articles up to date. Nothing more depressing than a stale web site.
The New York Times, August 18, 2005
Michael Ellison has a dream: to reconstruct a living thing inside a computer, down to every last molecule. It is, he said, “the ultimate goal in biology, to be able to do this.”
It’s a dream that Ellison, a biologist at the University of Alberta, shares with other scientists, who have imagined such an achievement for decades.
Understanding how all of the parts of an organism work together would lift biology to a new level, they argue. Biologists would be able to understand life as deeply as engineers understand the bridges and airplanes that they build.
Continue reading “Developing a model for life, starting with E. coli”
The New York Times, August 16, 2005
Michael Ellison has a dream: to reconstruct a living thing inside a computer, down to every last molecule. It is, he said, “the ultimate goal in biology to be able to do this.”
It’s a dream that Dr. Ellison, a biologist at the University of Alberta, shares with other scientists, who have imagined such an achievement for decades.
Understanding how all of the parts of an organism work together would lift biology to a new level, they argue. Biologists would be able to understand life as deeply as engineers understand the bridges and airplanes that they build.
Continue reading “Building a Virtual Microbe, Gene by Gene by Gene”
In today’s New York Times I have an article about the quest to create a virtual organism—a sort of digital Frankenstein accurate down to every molecular detail. The creature that the scientists I write about want to reproduce is that familiar denizen of our gut, Escherichia coli.
Mole rats are a pretty ugly, obscure bunch of creatures. They live underground in Africa, where they use their giant teeth to gnaw at roots. Those of you who know anything about mole rats most likely know about naked mole rats, which have evolved a remarkable society that is more insect than mammalian, complete with a queen mole rat ruling over her colony. But according to a paper in press at the Journal of Human Evolution, mole rats are important for another reason. Their evolution and our own show some striking parallels that may shed light on how our ancestors diverged from other apes.