Status Updates From Life at the Speed of Light:...

I’ve gotten what I needed from this book and will leave the earlier section mostly unread for now. It’s an admirable if sometimes knotty account, which could be valuable for anyone who wants to go beyond cursory news reports.

Venter refers to what he calls bioerror: the consequence of mistakes “made by a non-scientifically trained biohacker or ‘biopunk.’” Such people are out there, and by now they may have gone awry in a way that has made the news but that I missed. I know that overreactions by authorities have been reported; one such case is the basis for the plot framework of Richard Powers’s Orfeo.

The idea behind the creation of the first “synthetic cell” is simple in principle, but it required an immense amount of work. Venter and his team displayed an infinite capacity for taking pains—a proverbial definition of genius.

Still not trying to read the entire book (though I’m tempted, because I’d love to know more), so my “progress” is misleading. I’ve skipped ahead to a section most relevant to a writing project, a section discussing the piece-by-piece creation of a synthetic genome, which was then transplanted into an existing bacterium.

I’ve scanned the notes and started reading the text of an ARC as background for a writing project about the “de-extinction” of Tasmanian tigers. Probably won’t finish the book, because I don’t need to, but who knows?