Revolution in Biology Begins with Rat Heart

CNN.Com reports that "Researchers at the University of Minnesota were able to create a beating heart using the outer structure of one heart and injecting heart cells from another rat. Rather than building a heart from scratch, which has often been mentioned as possible use for stem cells, this procedure takes a heart and breaks it down to the outermost shell. It's similar to taking a house and gutting it, then rebuilding everything inside. In the human version, the patient's own cells would be used."

There's no commercial market for rat hearts (that we know of), but it does under the incredibly exciting revolution in biology that we think will create some great speculative investment opportunities in the next decade. We're bearish on financials, but bullish on biology.

In a recent speech in London, Dr. J. Craig Venter (the man who decoded the human genome) talked about how the digitization if biology may change the world. Not just in medicine. But in energy too. Human intelligence will design organic structures-metabolic engineering-to solve some of our most pressing problems. "Our ability to read the genetic code is changing even faster than the changes predicted by Moore's Law," he said.

That frightens some people. But we find it pretty exciting. As Venter says, "The future of life depends not on our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution by created by human intelligence."

Dan Denning
The Daily Reckoning Australia

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