Frederick Brummer from Lift Studios came to my house a while ago and had me rant at his camera machine for posterity. The fruits of that interview are up on the lift website in full-screen flashy loveliness.

Part one is pretty good, part two is funnier (the little transport bar at the top of the window has the link to part two) and contains valuable advice for participants the Vancouver underground electronic music scene.

Check it out.

There is, of course, the terrible spectre of something going terribly wrong. We could all die. The world could end. Horror.
But there’s always the terrible spectre of something going terrible wrong. That’s nothing new.

No scientific achievement has promised so much, and none has come with greater risks or clearer possibilities for deliberate abuse. The benefits of new technologies—from genetically engineered food to the wonders of pharmaceuticals—often have been oversold. If the tools of synthetic biology succeed, though, they could turn specialized molecules into tiny, self-contained factories, creating cheap drugs, clean fuels, and new organisms to siphon carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

My favourite bit though is when the auuthor points out that

Little more than a hundred years have passed, however, since Gregor Mendel demonstrated that the defining characteristics of a pea plant—its shape, its size, and the color of the seeds, for example—are transmitted from one generation to the next in ways that can be
predicted, repeated, and codified.

Now they’re working on a living organism built from non-living componente. They will call this organism Synthia.

Found via an interview with the author on Gizmodo.