Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Simple genome engineering of bacteria and yeast is just the beginning of the rise of the true biohackers. This is a community of several thousand people, with skill sets ranging from self-taught software hackers to biology postdocs who are impatient with the structure of traditional institutional lab work.
We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.
In the past, biology has been a backwater type of activity - a bunch of nerds in a lab. Now the sheer potential of biology to re-program our physical world is a new reality for everyone.
Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.
I think the ethics and morals of genetic engineering are very complicated. It intrigues me.
I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.
Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation.
The prize was really for the molecule. In 1962, Osamu Shimomura discovered a protein in a jellyfish that caused it to glow bright green. With colleagues, 30 years later, I was able to insert this G.F.P. gene into bacteria and make them turn green.
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes - as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.