/Gary
> Here's an interesting article from US News & World Report on the use of
> directed evolution in industry. These approaches will be routine in many
> fields soon.
>
> --John
>
> http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/980727/27evol.htm
>
> Excerpt:
>
> Science 7/27/98
>
>
> Touched by nature
> Putting evolution to work on the assembly line
>
>
> BY CHARLES W. PETIT
>
>
> A new kind of evolution is on the loose, and to hear its practitioners talk,
> the prospects are surreal. "Mom and dad jet engine can get together and have
> baby jet engines. You find the ones that work better, mate them, and just
> keep going," says David Goldberg, a professor of engineering at the
> University of Illinois. He is a leader among researchers who, with little
> fanfare, have hijacked evolution from the world of the living. Stripped down
> and souped up, this new evolution is ready, after 30 years of gestation, to
> go to work as an industrial, invention-spewing tool.
>
> Evolution as in Charles Darwin, blind chance, survival of the fittest, and
> all that? Yes. This is the same descent-with-modification evolution, right
> down to the lingo--sex, parents, offspring, selection, mutations, genes, and
> chromosomes--that biologists use to explain the emergence of new species.
> Except in this case, the product is not living tissue but complex hardware,
> solutions to maddeningly difficult scheduling problems, or novel molecules
> that evolve out of computer code, or even DNA.
>
> ....
>
>