News and Events

• January 12, 2012. New Scholarship Announced to Honor Frank H. Westheimer. January 15, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frank H. Westheimer, a founder of the field of biological chemistry. Today, scientists at The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology (TWIST) at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FfAME) follow his vision to apply chemistry to medicine, genomics, and biotechnology. Accordingly, in honor of Prof. Westheimer's centennial birthday, the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology, in collaboration with the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, is announcing the first year of a scholarship program to support the advanced education of children of students who have trained with TWIST and FfAME scientists. For more information, contact ljackson@ffame.org.

• August 23, 2011. The Royal Society of Chemistry describes a major new advance made at the FfAME in the area of synthetic biology (see Expanded genetic alphabet could spell out new genes). This advance comes from DTRA-funded work that studies the fundamental science that stands behind the DNA double helix.

• August 12, 2011. Steven Benner will join Arthur Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss artificial life with Patt Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist of the NPR affiliate KPCC in Los Angeles. The broadcast will be live on Friday, August 12, 1:30 - 2:00 PM Pacific / 4:30 - 5:00 PM Eastern, and will take listener calls.

• June 17, 2011. Steven Benner gave a plenary talk at the BioBricks meeting in Palo Alto on Friday. The master of the 18 minute talk, Dr. Benner's presentation will be available online in a few weeks. In addition to outlining the current status of synthetic biology at the FfAME, his talk produced the number one tweet among conference attendees who rebroadcasted Benner's aphorism: "Culture is what you think when you are not thinking."

• February 21, 2011. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, participated with Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter, and other scientists in a workshop on the origin of life. The discussion is summarized in the New York Times by science writer Dennis Overbye in a piece titled A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life.

• February 18, 2011. FfAME scientists speak with MSNBC about the furor over arsenic based life, and the possibility that such molecules might support genetics in ultracold environments, such as Titan, a moon of Saturn. For more, read Definition of life: Arsenic debate just won't die.

• February 8, 2011. The debate over arsenic DNA has been satirized by Scott Adams in this Dilbert comic strip.

• December 2, 2010. Steven Benner will participate in a NASA news conference to discuss a new finding in astrobiology that will aid in the search for extraterrestrial life. The conference will occur on Thursday, December 2 (14:00 EST) at NASA Headquarters. To attend the conference or watch it streamed live online, please view NASA media advisory M10-167.

• November 9, 2010. Steven Benner will present an 18 minute talk as part of the National Academy's program "Sharing the Adventure with the Public", which communicates to the public the value and excitement of 'Grand Questions' in space science and exploration. The program will be held November 8-10 at the Beckman Center on the campus of the University of California, Irvine. Click here for more information.

• November 8, 2010. Dr. Steven Benner will speak on Monday, November 8 (15:45-16:15, EST) at a NASA online "Workshop Without Walls" on Molecular Paleontology and Resurrection. The workshop has already gone viral, and will attract an audience from Tanzania to Iran to Oklahoma. Dr. Benner is the inventor of paleogenetics, where genes and proteins from ancient organisms are resurrected in laboratory studies important to science and medicine. Click here for more information.

• October 14, 2010. In a symposium celebrating 50 years of Astrobiology at NASA, Steven Benner will be presenting a popular lecture on "Extraterrestrial Life. How and Where to Look". A master of "the 18 minute talk" and author of the book "Life, the Universe and the Scientific Method", Prof. Benner will discuss with a panel of experts current ideas about life on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and other exotic locales in the Solar System. The symposium is all day Thursday, October 14, at the Lockheed Martin Theater in Crystal City, Arlington, VA.

• August 30, 2010. In Science magazine this week, FfAME scientists analyze the potential roles of silicate, aluminate, and borate minerals in the origin of life.
H.-J. Kim, S. A. Benner (2010) Science 329, 902

• May 20, 2010. Nature magazine has featured a commentary by FfAME scientists on the synthesis of an entire bacterial genome in the J. Craig Venter Institute. This synthesis is the next step in the whole gene synthesis paradigm that began in the Benner laboratory in 1984. See Life after the synthetic cell for a full set of comments.

• April 29, 2010. On Thursday, April 29, Matthew Carrigan, Fellow at the FfAME, will present recent advances on the use of paleogenetics to understand human behavior as it relates to alcoholism and alcohol abuse. He will be speaking at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

• April 26, 2010. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, and Robert Shapiro, Professor at New York University, squared off yesterday at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Houston, over the role of RNA in the origin of life. The debate, moderated by Nick Hud from Georgia Tech, went for 90 minutes, including audience contributions.

• April 2, 2010. On Friday, April 2, in the New Physics Building at the University of Florida, Matthew Carrigan and Steven Benner will join distinguished astrobiologists from UF and NASA, as well as physicists and astronomers interested galaxies, stars, and planets, to discuss "origins", of life, the universe, and everything. The panel discussion, open to the public and taking questions from the floor, will begin at 7:00 PM.

• November 6, 2009. FfAME scientists are featured tonight on Bloomberg News as part of their "Innovators" program. Airing times are Fri: 9:00pm, 11:00pm; Sat: 3:00pm, 6:00pm, 8:00pm, 10:00pm; Sun: 12:00am 10:00am, 1:00pm, 4:00pm. The episode will also appear this evening on the Bloomberg Innovators webpage.

• November 6, 2009. Prof. Steven Benner will participate in a Pontifical Academy Study week on Astrobiology at the Vatican in Italy. He will be presenting a talk entitled: "Towards a Theory of Life."

• October 20, 2009. Prof. Steven Benner will be giving a public lecture on "Life, the Universe and the Scientific Method" in Seattle, WA. The lecture is sponsored by the Astrobiology program at the University of Washington. He will also be signing books on campus.

• October 9, 2009. Bloomberg News, as part of its "Innovators" series, has interviewed scientists at the FfAME, for viewing later this month.

• October 7, 2009. Prof. Steven Benner will be giving a talk on "The Role of Planet Earth in Life's Origins" at Harvard University Biological Laboratories (Lecture Hall, 16 Divinity Avenue, Room 1068). He will also be signing books in Cambridge, MA on October 6.

Steven Benner (right), Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, discussing molecular structure with Jack Szostak at dinner just after the Prize was announced.

• October 5, 2009. Jack Szostak wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine. Prof. Szostak at the Massachusetts General Hospital is a long time collaborator of scientists at the FfAME, most recently in a project funded by the National Science Foundation under its Chemical Bonding program.

• April 6, 2009. Paleogenetics: A Quarter Century Old. The spring of 2009 marks the 25th anniversary of the first paper taking steps to resurrect ancient genes and proteins from extinct organisms to test historical hypotheses and join natural history to the physical sciences. These first steps in the laboratory of Steven Benner, then at Harvard but now at the FfAME, opened the new field of experimental paleogenetics. Today, over two dozen paleogenetics studies have helped us understand how humans adapted to alcohol, dinosaurs saw colors, and bacterial life originated.

• March 23, 2009. Twenty Five Years of Synthetic Biology. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of a paper reporting the first total synthesis of a gene encoding an enzyme. The gene was made in the Benner group by Krishnan Nambiar, Joseph Stackhouse, Dora Stauffer and John Eldredge. Today, the chemical synthesis of a gene is routine, using the strategy described in this pioneering work.

• February 25, 2009. Scientists at the Foundation discuss recent research on synthetic biology, DNA, and medicine. Watch the video.

• February 15, 2009. FfAME scientists announce an artificial chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Read the press release.

• February 12, 2009. Happy 200^th Birthday, Charles Darwin!

• January 1, 2009. In the new year, the FfAME will be distributing copies of the new book by Dr. Steven Benner titled: Life, the Universe, and the Scientific Method for an introductory price of $34.95 plus shipping and handling. For information, please contact Romaine Hughes.

• December 31, 2008. The year 2009 marks the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. FfAME scientists will participate in festive and scientific events around the world to mark this anniversary, including the Darwin Day hosted by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina on February 21, the Molecular Evolution Conference at McMaster University in Canada, May 25-29, and the "Evolving Evolution" symposium at Harvard, October 8 and 9.

• December 16, 2008. The American Geophysical Union will feature a special session on the chemical elements in biology. Work of FfAME scientists, including H. J. Kim, will discuss two of these, boron and molybdenum, and their role in models for the origin of life on Earth.

• June 1, 2008. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, will join the discussion on the "Universal Laws of Life" in the World Science Festival on June 1 in New York City. This week long program includes actor Alan Alda and PBS's Brian Greene, and will make many of the most exciting themes in science accessible to the public.

• April 25, 2008. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, gave a plenary lecture at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara last week, on the origin of life and the possibility of alien life in environments quite different from Earth. See commentary.

• February 7, 2008. FfAME scientists, in collaboration with the University of Florida and DNA2.0, have concluded that 3.5 billion years ago life lived in a hot environment of 165° F (75° C), and gradually cooled to 100° F (40° C) by 500 million years ago. The study, published today in Nature, reconstructed ancient bacterial genes that serve as ancient thermometers. The findings are nearly identical to geological studies that estimate ancient ocean temperatures over the same time period.

• January 23, 2008. Dr. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, will speak on the "Scientific Method" in a public lecture sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. The lecture will be at 8:00 in the evening at the Beckman Center on the campus of the University of California at Irvine.

• January 7, 2008. FfAME scientists will make a multi-media presentation to residents of Oak Hammock at the University of Florida. Starting at 1:30 PM, the presentation is entitled: "The Origin of Life".

• December 1, 2007. Dr. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, will participate in the Space Science Symposium, Beckman Center, Irvine CA. This is one of the monthly events celebrating the second International Geophysical Year, on the 50th anniversary of the first IGY in 1957. The launch of Sputnik was the most the notable event of the IGY, and began the space age.

• October 4, 2007. Dr. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the FfAME, will join three other panelists in a debate, open to the public, about the origin of life. The venue will be the third annual Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium, held at McGill University in Montreal in the evening of October 4. The other panelists are Antonio Lazcano, noted expert on origins from the University of Mexico City, Robert Shapiro, author and professor emeritus at NYU, and Stuart Kauffman, mathematician and professor at the University of Calgary. Christopher McKay, astrobiologist and planetary explorer, will moderate. Work on the origins of life ongoing at the FfAME has been funded by the Astrobiology program at NASA. Click here for a primer on the debate topics.

• September 4, 2007. Listeners of Earth & Sky will have the opportunity to hear two reports from Foundation scientists this month. The first concerns the nature of alien life. The second concerns the emerging field of synthetic biology, which FfAME scientists pioneered and which is a major research focus of the Foundation.

• August 30, 2007. Dr. Steven Benner, distinguished fellow at the Foundation, gives a plenary lecture at the 10th International Mars Society Convention at 1pm on the campus of University of California at Los Angeles. He will speak of the potential for life on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system.

• August 20, 2007. The Associated Press and Seth Borenstein reported today on the work on synthetic biology at the Foundation. Synthetic genetic systems developed by Foundation scientists already improve the health care of some 400,000 patients, and work in progress cited by the Associated Press promises to expand that impact in the future.

• July 6, 2007. FfAME scientist coauthored a report from the National Academy of Sciences describing forms of unusual extraterrestrial life. Click here to read the full report online. The New York Times reports in a piece titled Expanded Search for Extraterrestrial Life Urged.

• December 18, 2006. Foundation scientists supported by the Templeton Foundation will be participating in a symposium in Tempe to decide whether we have missed detecting a form of life on Earth quite different from the life here that we know about.

• November 15, 2006. A paper from Foundation scientists was the second most downloaded paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October. See: Benner, Devine, Matveeva & Powell (2000) The missing organic molecules on Mars. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 97, 2425. This work was supported by NASA through its Exobiology program.

• November 3, 2006. German television will be filming an episode of Quarks on the FfAME campus. Quarks is similar to the NOVA program from WGBH. This episode will focus on the use of artificial DNA in human diagnostics and systems biology research, and the likelihood of unusual genetic systems in alien life.

• October 27, 2006. Geological research published this week in Nature concluded that oceans 3 billion years ago were 150° F (65° C). At this time, common bacteria were first emerging, and must have been adapted to these high temperatures. This remarkable conclusion was predicted three years ago by Foundation scientists through their analysis of bacterial genomes, and the resurrection of ancient proteins from extinct ancestral bacteria. The Foundation work was featured last year in the Wall Street Journal.

• October 24, 2006. With their collaborators from the Harvard Medical School and the Scripps Research Institute, Foundation scientists hosted a site visit of distinguished scientists in La Jolla to present their progress to create artificial Darwinian chemical systems as part of a Foundation-Harvard-Scripps Center for Chemical Bonding supported by the National Science Foundation.

• October 23, 2006. Christopher McKay and his colleagues at NASA Ames confirmed a prediction made by FfAME scientists in 2000, that the Viking 1976 Mars lander could have overlooked considerable amounts of organic material on the surface of Mars (Navaro-Gonzales et al. (2006) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 103, 16089; Benner et al. (2000) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, 97, 2425 see also Wall Street Journal Tuesday, October 24, p B1).

• October 9, 2006. Dr. Eric Gaucher will describe advances in 'Evolutionary Synthetic Biology' to the Chemistry Dept. at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. and the Botany Dept. at the University of Florida. This work exploits evolutionary models in attempts to design synthetic DNA polymerases that accept modified DNA bases. See their listings for time and location.

• October 8, 2006. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, will be this week's guest of Mat Kaplan, host of the radio show "Planetary Radio", produced by the Planetary Society. Covering the possibilities of extracellular life, the interview can be heard locally on Radio NHCWX 11:00-11:30 PM, Friday October 13. Other listings throughout the week can be found by clicking here.

• October 4, 2006. Foundation scientists announced their participation in the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics competition to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days for a cost of less than $10,000 per genome. The announcement was made at a gala celebration in Washington DC attended by Foundation representatives, several Nobel laureates, and Dr. J. Craig Venter, the first human to have his genome sequenced.

• July 28, 2006. FfAME scientists present new data describing the chemistry behind the origin of life at the Gordon Conference at Bates College in July. In a major breakthrough, FfAME scientists have provided a series of chemical steps that move simple organic molecules all of the way to the first genetic molecules.

• July 13, 2006. The FfAME announces the opening of The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology. TWIST brings together molecular science, natural history, chemistry and medicine to provide a unique polydisciplinary education and training program for graduate students and postdoctoral associates. Download brochure (3.5MB).

• June 15, 2006. FfAME scientists present new data on human diagnostics at the Gordon Conference on Stereochemistry in June. These advances include tools that detect small RNA molecules in complex biological tissues, key to understanding biology and disease, including human cancer.

• March 26, 2006. Dr. Steven Benner engaged in the "Great Debate: Does life exist in the cosmos in a form different from the life we know on Earth?" at the 2006 Astrobiology National Meeting in Washington, DC on March 29. Details...

• March 1, 2006. The FfAME announces a new grant from the NIH to develop more efficient combinatorial libraries in collaboration with DNA 2.0.

• December 9, 2005. The Emory University Conference Center recently hosted a symposium "Pioneering Research for 50 Years", for former Benner coworkers in Atlanta on December 9-11, 2005 to highlight a half century of pioneering research.

• February 20, 2005. FfAME scientists, as part of the Foundation's outrearch program, presented a seminar at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the origin on life and the chemistry that might support metabolism in alien life.