As the AAAS meeting wraps up today, here's a newswire story reporting on innovations in synthetic biology. The article quotes Stanford's Drew Endy in a prediction of what will happen in the next six years: "I bet we will be able to construct a human chromosome, and the yeast genome," according to Endy. The story also reports on talks from Jay Keasling and Christina Smolke, who "spoke about her efforts to design molecules that go into the cell and analyze the cellular state before delivering a therapeutic effect," the article says.
GenomeWeb was at the session too, and Andrea Anderson reported on Endy's call for "a national [US] initiative to support and encourage synthetic biology."