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Yesterday the Department of Defense announced the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine. This means they have a department specifically devoted to growing new human tissue.

If you read Scientific American, or are tuned in to the wild world of modern science to any degree, you'll already know that thanks to the wonders of stem cell research and other techniques, scientists are able to grow living tissue. But not just tissue, actual organs: "...blood vessels, livers, bladders, breast implants... [and] beating, disembodied rat hearts" (source).

Here's a fairly comprehensive article on the whole thing: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=regrowing-human-limbs

"We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ" -- Being a Lego guy myself, this makes perfect sense to me. Scientists have basically grown a heart that not only beats but "seem[s] to know how to behave like heart tissue". The source of the article is here: Researchers create beating heart in lab. This is just another ongoing step towards who-knows-what, driven by the natural progression of a species to learn. And, like my earlier post on the grander subject, begs the question: What is nature?

Scientists have been able to create DNA in a test tube for 50 years or so, but only in small amounts (IE: one or two genes). Now that is changing. Thanks to computers and other magnificent (and/or scary) technologies we are able to compose entire strands of DNA much like we would a computer program:

"Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with "natural" DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell's old DNA and become its new "brain" -- telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute." (Source: WA Post, Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms)

The ramifications of this are quite huge in many aspects of society: medicine, disease, performance, comprehension, growth, energy, and not to mention the capability of basically being able to engineer a being. This raises a lot of questions for me, the main one being: What is nature?

For further reading on synthetic DNA, here's a Google news search.