Falling Back and Jumping Ahead

Falling Back and Jumping Ahead

In a few days (March 14) Daylight Saving Time will begin. And even though I will lose an hour of snooze time, I am sleeping much better these days now that I delivered the manuscript for my new book to Baker Books. (The title: Creating Life in the Lab: How New Discoveries in Synthetic Biology Make a Case for the Creator. The release date: February 2011.)

That’s the good news. The bad news is I fell so far behind getting the manuscript ready that I didn’t get a chance to finish my article for this week. However, it will be available next week. I promise. It should be a humdinger, too. (At least that’s my opinion.) In all seriousness, next week’s article will describe recent work in which a team of synthetic biologists from UC Berkeley genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to make biodiesel.

As a prelude to that article, I invite you to reread (or maybe read for the first time), a piece I wrote last summer describing similar work by another team of scientists who also attempted to produce alternative fuel via E. coli engineered to make alcohols.