Most people look at the cedar in Drew Endy's front yard and admire its graceful green boughs, heavy with needles, sap and cones.

Endy sees something much different: an industrial manufacturing platform, waiting to be exploited.

"I dream we could someday reprogram trees that could self-assemble a computer chip in your front yard," exudes the brilliant and intense Stanford University bioengineer, who has emerged as a leading evangelist in the new field of synthetic biology.

One gene at a time, Endy and other elite teams of Bay Area scientists are striving to design and build organisms unlike anything made by Mother Nature.

It's not yet possible to create artificial life from scratch. But it's getting closer, through projects that essentially swap out a cell's original operating system for a lab-designed one. These made-to-order creations then can be put to work.

The Human Genome Project gave us the ability to read nature's instruction manual -- DNA -- like words in a book. But the real opportunities, scientists say, lie in our ability to not only read genetic code, but to write it, then build it using off-the-shelf chemical ingredients, strung together like holiday lights. It is the creation of new genomes -- and a new frontier in bioengineering.

Synthetic biology works because biological creatures are, in essence, programmable manufacturing systems. The DNA instruction manual buried inside every cell -- its software, in a

This presages the distant day when Endy's big Menlo Park cedar churns out computer chips, not cones. Or makes cancer-fighting drugs. Or fuels. Or building materials. Or anything else.

There are concerns about safety and ethics. In the wrong hands, lone villains or rogue regimes could unleash dangerous life forms. A review in 2010 by a White House commission concluded the field needs monitoring, but the risks are still limited.

Synthetic biology is different from genetic engineering, which simply inserts a gene from one organism into another.

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Synthetic biology: Stanford, Cal engineering a new frontier