Word: biotech
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...working on advertising-driven newsreader software.) RSS allows you to play news editor and zero in on the information you really need, even as you expand the number of sites you sample. You can subscribe to just the parts of the Seattle Times, for example, that cover biotech and the Mariners baseball team. Or you can go even deeper: instead of looking through all the new apartment-rental ads on classifieds site Craigslist, say, you can enter your price range and your preferred neighborhoods, and save that search result as an RSS feed. The appropriate listings pop up in your...
...believe The Island, the private sector, in the very near future, is about to make Halliburton and the rest of those scary big guys look like a kids' corner lemonade stand. Director Michael Bay's new movie posits a secretive biotech operation offering rich people the opportunity to have their very own, disease-free clones. In other words, for $5 million you can have a more or less living insurance policy. Need a kidney transplant? You got it, helicoptered right to the operating room...
Jing Cheng, 42, is at the cusp of that effort. Like an increasing number of other Chinese scientists and engineers, the CEO of CapitalBio Corp. has returned from the U.S., where he ran a small biotech company in San Diego, to pursue opportunities at home. An offshoot of Beijing's Tsinghua University (often called the M.I.T. of China), CapitalBio is among an élite group of Chinese life-sciences companies and research institutes. At the Beijing Genomics Institute researchers have decoded the rice genome and worked to find a cure for SARS. CapitalBio has already shown it also plays...
...harsh chemicals to process ethanol, but microbes could do the same thing. "I think it's doable within this decade," says Patrinos, "that we will develop a superbug that can make that conversion in a very clean way." Indeed, JGI, in collaboration with the San Diego-based biotech company Diversa, is sequencing communities of bacteria from the guts of termites in an effort to find genes that make hydrogen and ethanol. It's also looking for genes that enable microbes to metabolize radioactive waste...
Enzymes that help transform cornstarch into ethanol are fairly run-of-the-mill in biotech terms. The same can't be said of those needed to brew bioethanol from indigestible plant fibers. Making enzymes efficient and cheap enough for that has long been an obstacle to a viable bioethanol industry. Canada's Iogen is the only biotech firm to have shipped a batch of commercial bioethanol (see main story). But Novozymes is making waves as well. It announced in March that with $17 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funding, it had reduced the cost of enzymes for making...