SCIENTISTS LAUNCH WILD NEW PROJECT TO BUILD A HUMAN GENOME FROM SCRATCH

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

The Synthetic Human Genome Project aims to write artificial human DNA from scratch - the scientists behind the project are hoping that it will answer fundamental questions about the human genome and transform our understanding of health and disease. The technology could be used to create new medical treatments like designer cell-based therapies and virus-resistant tissue transplantation. The research team hopes to be able to create the foundational tools, technologies, and methods to allow researchers to create genomes from scratch over the next half-decade. The project runs along a parallel research effort into the social and ethical issues of creating human genomes in a lab.