Mad Scientists and their Life Forms
You consider yourself an unorthodox, free-thinking mind? Well, I am afraid you missed a crucial deadline: a definitely weird but also inspiring competition has found its winners without you.
I refer to the world’s first “mad science contest” (themed “Build a Life Form and We’ll Send You to Hong Kong”). Searching for “biology to be brazen”, the contest ought to identify “mad scientists with homebrew closet labs, grassroots geneticists, and garage genome hackers”. These mad scientists were “the people most likely to change the world”, the organisers believe.
What was the challenge about? Well, the contestants were asked on June 7th this year to build a real life form using “scientifically plausible” materials (whatever this might be).
After almost three months, the winners had been found: champion in the “biobricks life form category” is Vijaykumar Meli with his novel class of rhizobial bacteria that do symbiosis with rice roots what makes nitrogen synthesis more efficiently. Meli is a biotechnology Ph.D. student from New Delhi, India. Take a look at his “mad” idea (actually quite conventional, isn’t it?).
Other synthetic life forms suggested by the competitors are worlds more bizarre – such as Elliott Gresswell’s carnivorous, water-going tree and Naor Livne’s Spliterphage.
The question of whether top-ranking politicians are life forms, too, remains to be answered.
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It was a fun contest. Creating biobricks is harder than claimed in the news.. there are a lot of unknowns and not even the experts know how to predict or model the design. At least I got a “runner up” although I didn’t realize they’d publish the paper online!
Cheers
Jonathan