EXCERPT

Launched in 2016 with the sprawling ambition to build large genomes, the synthetic biology initiative known as Genome Project-write (GP-write) is now, slowly, getting down to specifics. Ahead of a meeting today in Boston, GP-write's leadership announced a plan to organize its international group of collaborators around a "community-wide project": engineering cells to resist viral infection.

GP-write's original proposal to design and assemble an entire human genome from scratch seems to have receded from view since the project's rocky launch, when a private meeting of its founders sparked accusations of secrecy and speculations about lab-100made humans. A proposal published weeks later in Science described GP-write as a decade-long effort to reduce by more than 1000-fold the cost of engineering and testing large genomes consisting of hundreds of millions of DNA letters.