WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

The Scripps Research Institute's Floyd Romesberg and colleagues have been pushing toward this goal for well over a decade. Three years ago, they announced that they had added two more letters to the genetic alphabet of a bacterium: To DNA's familiar A, T, C, and G, they added X and Y.

That expanded genetic alphabet vastly increased the number of "words" that DNA could store, and so expanded the language of life.

Now they report in the journal Nature that they've engineered those bacterial cells to read that new code and to use it to assemble proteins that contain man-made parts.

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