From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Sep 09 1999 - 20:11:45 MDT
On Thu, 9 Sep 1999 hal@finney.org wrote:
> However it would be hard to go from this in the opposite direction
> to figure out how to change things so as to produce something very
> different. The overall system is relatively specialized to producing a
> particular organism. You could tweak chemical gradients and maybe get
> a sixth finger or something, but you'd need a complete redesign to get
> an entirely new shape.
Actually, Hal, it depends on *how* different you want it. :-)
They have engineered Drosophila with legs growing out of the head
and I believe with extra sets of wings. It simply involves adding
putting a gene that makes and "X" and under the regulation of
the "Y" region control element, i.e.
if (I_Am_In_Region_Y)
Synthesize_Collection_Of_Cells_for_X();
If it looks like something you already grow, you could probably assemble
them in a fairly ad hoc fasion.
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:05 MST