It works.
Back in 2016, biologist Craig Venter achieved something extraordinary. He built a new species of bacteria from scratch in the lab - the simplest genetic life form known to science, made entirely through chemical synthesis of a custom-made genome.
Now, he's unveiled a new machine that could print these synthetic life forms on demand - simply feed in a genome design, and let the 'ink' form the building blocks of life. The invention could see us colonise Mars with synthetic life without ever setting foot on the Red Planet, and Venter and Elon Musk have teamed up to make this happen.
Called 'biological teleportation', the technique could allow scientists to email the genome from Earth to a printer on Mars, theoretically allowing us to colonise the Red Planet from afar.
"I think biological teleportation is what is going to truly enable the colonisation of Mars," Venter told his biographer Ashlee Vance back in 2015.
"Elon and I have been talking about how this might play out."
The new tabletop prototype, called the digital-to-biological converter (DBC), is the first machine that can receive genetic sequences via the internet or radio waves.
That means it can print the four chemical bases of DNA - guanine, thymine, cytosine, and adenine (G, T, C and A) - via remote control to form various biological components.
"Just like a printer, it needs cassettes, but instead of colours, it's bottles of chemicals," Venter told Jordan Pearson at Motherboard.
"It's packaging complex biology that each of our tiny cells do remarkably well at a much, much smaller scale."
Venter has been working on this prototype for years now, but a new study describes how it's finally been able to produce biological compounds such as DNA templates, RNA molecules, proteins, and viral particles without any human intervention.
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