science

In 2004, a group of undergraduates at MIT entered a competition to build biological machines. The challenge: design standardized genetic parts, assemble them into functional systems, and demonstrate that biology could be engineered like any other technology. The competition was called iGEM—the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. That first

For four billion years, life evolved through random mutation and natural selection. Slow. Undirected. Whatever worked, survived. Now we're learning to design it. Synthetic biology is the engineering of living systems. It treats cells as programmable machines, DNA as code, proteins as components. The goal isn't

Let's pull it together. We've traced mitochondria from their bacterial origins to their central role in cellular energy, from their separate genome to their implications for aging and disease, from their quality control systems to their presence at the heart of cancer metabolism, from their inheritance

In 2016, a baby was born with DNA from three people. His mother carried a mutation in her mitochondrial DNA that causes Leigh syndrome—a devastating neurological disorder that had already killed two of her children. There was no way to prevent passing the mutation to another child through normal

In 2012, George Church's lab at Harvard encoded a 53,000-word book into DNA. Not a metaphor. They took the digital file—including images and JavaScript code—and converted it to DNA sequences. They synthesized those sequences, stored them in a tube, and later sequenced them back to

In 2020, a team of researchers created something that didn't quite fit existing categories. They took cells from frog embryos—specifically, skin cells and heart cells from Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog—and arranged them into tiny blobs, about half a millimeter wide. The blobs weren'