Murray Eden (see Fig. 9.1), a professor of engineering and computer science at MIT, was accustomed to thinking about how to build things. But when he began to consider the importance of information to building living organisms, he realized something didn’t add up. His critics said that he knew just enough biology to be dangerous. In retrospect, they were probably right. In the early 1960s, just as molecular biologists had confirmed Francis Crick’s famed sequence hypothesis, Eden began to think about the challenge of building a living organism. Of course, Eden wasn’t contemplating building a
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