[DIYbio] Re: Bioengineering a Dragon

What would it take?

As someone with a background in data analytics and mostly computing/programming my first step would be to sequence all (or as much of as possible) known cellular life to have the data ready.  From there you could apply semantic matching algorithms with known genes across species to create a key of footprints (semantic footprints are like sentence structures when the technique is applied to words).  With that key you could then extrapolate known and unknown genes across the vast majority of other cellular life.  There are some key things you'd want (development of appendages, the ability to breath fire from something like the bombardier bettle's binary explosive with activator and suppressor protiens to prevent the dragon from harming itself, etc) but ultimately you'd be going for the semantic matching database required to do such a thing.  From there you could construct a higher-order language that utilizes the semantic database to compile to DNA after coding out and debugging your dragon.

WHY you would do it?

It's kind of an absurd project to take on that would require a mastery of synthetic biology.  There are other things like houses made from modified trees designed to be planted, dyson trees for space colonization or lower-order organisms to produce drugs or other useful compounds but they all come with a huge negative aspect: a tendency to cut corners and not crack the whole problem of how precisely to write DNA to do arbitrarily complex tasks in order to meet the specific task.  A dragon would be an absurdly-complex undertaking by modern science and in shooting for it you would likely crack the whole DNA system before you got there.  Undertaking such a thing would open the door to more arbitrarily complex tasks (think of a leviathan style space ship for colonization that could be grown on asteroids and act as a scaffold onto which you could graft biotech components - it's something WAY outside the realm of our current understanding of biotech but the same solution would make such a thing possible by reducing the problem down to something no more complex than computer programming is today).

That said, I've actually done some serious research into the costs of doing the sequencing and data analytics side of things, spoken with vendors and should sequencing costs continue to drop it could be done in about 20-40 years for about the same cost as the Human genome project.  If you're interested in collaborating on it send me an email and we can go over details.

On Wednesday, January 14, 2015 at 6:11:22 PM UTC-5, Nikolai Braun wrote:

Anybody ever think about making a dragon?  What it would take, how you would do it?  WHY you would do it?  

I'm part of the team at Revolution Bioengineering working on color-changing flowers, and we saw that people are finding their way to our website using search terms which imply that there are people out there who are thinking about how to bioengineer a dragon...

Thus we began our guide: How to make a dragon

What do you think?  Have and comments?  

We have a part two queued up, the part three is unwritten right now-- we were hoping to craft that using some of the discussions that happened here.