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Michael Grome, a postdoctoral associate in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale and first author of the study, likened codons to three-letter words within a sentence in the genetic recipe for life. “A lot of these words are equivalent, or synonymous,” Grome said. “We set out to add more ingredients for building proteins, so we took three of these words for ‘stop’ and made them one. Two words were removed, then we re-engineered the cell so they were ‘freed’ for new function. We then engineered a cell that recognized the word to say something new, to represent a new ingredient.”

The risks posed by the unintended spread of GMOs are uncertain, but they are infinitely lower than the nightmare scenarios painted by opponents.

Researchers at Harvard and Yale have used some extreme gene-manipulation tools to engineer safety features into designer organisms. This work goes far beyond traditional genetic engineering, which involves moving a gene from one organism to another. In this case, they're actually rewriting the language of genetics.

Imagine that you wanted to remove every instance of the letter Q from the English language without losing meaningful words spelled with Q, and without adding any new letters to the alphabet. You’d have to choose an alternate letter to take Q’s place—C or K, perhaps—then rewrite books with the new letter and re-teach people to spell and read using the new alphabet. Such an undertaking is what a team of Yale, Harvard, and MIT researchers have recently completed. Rather than altering the English language, however, they removed a letter from the genetic alphabet of a bacteria.

Scientists from Yale and Harvard have recoded the entire genome of an organism and improved a bacterium’s ability to resist viruses, a dramatic demonstration of the potential of rewriting an organism’s genetic code.

When exposed to the antibiotic streptomycin, bacterial cells begin making mistakes in protein production. The error-ridden proteins fold improperly and accumulate in the cell, clumping into toxic aggregates that eventually kill the bacteria.