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I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth. ( The Guardian)

Nobel Season and a note on RNA

Nobel Season. In the Pipeline:

Interesting to note:

The Nobel in Medicine has gone this year to the inventors of gene-knockout techniques for mice, which seems well-deserved, considering how much has been learned through such experiments. This is, in fact, one of those discoveries that you'd think was already recognized by a Nobel if you hadn't been keeping count, which is as good a criterion as any. (It's rather odd, for example, that gene knockouts were recognized after RNA interference, don't you think, since a good ten or fifteen years separate the two in real life?)

My previous post noted that over 46,000 hits came up for "knock-out mice" search on PubMed.  Interesting, RNAi gets only 9868,  Certainly not a perfect measures but informative on some level. 

Nobel Season. In the Pipeline:

Nobel Season. In the Pipeline::

"... Wednesday morning is the announcement of the Chemistry award, so I'm throwing open the gates of speculation, as I do every year around here. Our track record (mine and the predictions in the comments) has not been very good, but nobody has a good batting average when trying to read the minds of the Nobel committees. I feel pretty safe in saying that this year will be a "real" chemistry prize - we're one out of the last four, compared to overflow from the nonexistent Nobel in molecular and cell biology.

So, who's it going to be? Last year's uninformed gossip is here, and there's plenty more over at Chembark. Put your bets down, but only with money you can afford to lose. . .

Update: Still more speculation."

Three Americans Win Noble Prize for Medicine

Two Americans and a Brit won the noble prize for medicine for their
work in gene targeting, a process using homologous recombination to
turn off a single gene. When used in mice it is known as using
"knock-out mice", as that gene has been knocked out. Having a single
gene, and only that gene, turned off helps to understand how that gene
functions.

The two Americans are Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies. Sir
Martin J. Evans is British.

To give an idea of how important this technique is today, a search on
pub med, the medical research literature database, for "knock-out
mice" gives you over 46,820 research papers.