Why a synthetic human genome is still worth building

A severe tropical storm brought torrential rain to Tokyo on Wednesday, swelling rivers, grounding flights, and sparking calls to evacuate for hundreds of thousands of people across wide swaths of Japan.

Hookworms, intestinal parasites that infect hundreds of millions of people in under-resourced tropical regions around the globe, have evolved to survive inside the human gut for years, secreting molecules that enable coexistence with their hosts. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have harnessed that biological mechanism for potential human benefit, engineering a hookworm to produce and deliver a drug within a living host.

As SpaceX prepares its long-awaited stock market debut, investors everywhere are scrambling to get a piece of the action—through investment funds, related company stocks, and even online prediction markets.