David Baker is professor of biochemistry and an HHMI investigator at the University of Washington. When he started there in 1994, the problem of "computing the structures of naturally occurring proteins and designing brand new ones [was] considered to be almost impossible," he says. His group has since created ROSETTA, a program that searches for lowest energy structures to do just this, and on page 34 he describes how it's being used to design an endonuclease to attack malaria and a potential vaccine for HIV.
Six years ago when Lee M. Silver, professor of molecular biology and public affairs at Princeton University, spent a nine-month sabbatical backpacking through Asia with his wife and three children, his eyes were opened to spiritual perspectives on issues such as genetically modified crops and stem cell research. In an excerpt from his new book Challenging Nature (p. 48), he argues that...
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