'Bits to Atoms to Biology'

At Forbes' Techonomy 2011 meeting held in Tucson, Ariz., this week, Singularity University's Andrew Hessel called synthetic biology "one of the most powerful technologies in the world," contributor Alyson Krueger reports. "We're going to make synthetic human genomes and edit them, and we’re going to end up with IVF technologies that can boot them," Hessel continued. "It will make cloning look organic, and the ways we have babies today quaint." Hessel also said that, with time, synthetic biologists will have the "ability to engineer every plant and animal, including humans," Forbes' Krueger adds. She says that's how the Techonomy speaker plans to have his own children. "For Hessel, who put off parenthood so many years ago, now's the time — and the lab is the place — to procreate," Krueger writes. A video of Hessel's talk appears here.