Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/02/synthetic-biologist-floyd-rome.html
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What could possibly go wrong?
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Not nearly as much as you might think. The artificiality is a feature, not a bug - the newly crafted organisms cannot reproduce outside of laboratory conditions. They do the job they were designed for and then die off.
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Would it be possible for any terrestrial organism to digest proteins that used different base pairs?
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“Synthetic biologist…” Yikes!
An unfortunate coupling both for those practicing such biology and for the awkward syntax.
How about “synthetic biology scientist Floyd Romesberg…”
PS: Here’s Floyd; looks like trouble to me.
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Nonsense. I expect many great, exotic, multi-legged, screeching, mewling, ill-starred creatures for our brave new world!
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I believe someone once said ‘life will find a way’.
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Inb4 uracil pedantry
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DNA is made of base pairs, and sequences of base pairs correspond to various amino acids (from a list of 40 or so). Those amino acids make up proteins.
So, whatever the DNA is made of, it can only make proteins from the amino acids on hand, and if they are the standard ones, then there will be nothing unusual about the resulting proteins.
If you made proteins from novel amino acids, though, then yes, digesting them would be a problem. And they might well be close enough to real proteins that they would mess you up more than eating something completely foreign like styrofoam.
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To give you credit, I sorta thought my quote wasn’t quite correct 
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Q: I wonder if Looking-Glass milk is good to drink?
A: No.
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I remember there was a lot of discussion about that in this kids’ sci fi book
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Pikers. I’m developing a triple helix dna. Much sturdier.
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So what makes us what and who we are is, in essence, a four letter word.
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Once upon a time, I used to enjoy Dilbert. This reminds me of those far-off days.
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And in an old favorite of mine, Roger Zelazny’s Doorways In The Sand. Needless to say, I liked it better than this reviewer did:
https://www.tor.com/2009/08/27/beautiful-poetic-and-experimental-roger-zelaznys-doorways-in-the-sand/
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Australian SF writer Greg Egan wrote a short story called “The Moat” about a crime scene investigator who couldn’t work out why the sperm sample from a rape kit wasn’t showing any DNA results, only to realise that the rapist was a member of the zotta-rich who had his base pairs swapped out to make him immune to all known diseases.
It is available in his short story collection “Axiomatic”
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Good point! He barely looks synthetic at all to me in that photo.
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Although there are non-canonical amino acids (beyond the canonical 20) in natural proteins.
I also don’t think that most ncAAs stop the protein being a substrate for the proteases in your gut so you can still break it down to its constituent amino acids (then excrete any that you can’t reuse or break down further).
Finally, you eat plenty of large indigestible molecules, like cellulose, with no ill effects.
The only real problem would be if the ncAA (or the protein) was actually toxic.
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