What’s the Point of Streamlining Nature?

Syn3.0 has the fewest genes of any self-replicating creature on Earth. It’s a marvel of engineering, and it’s doomed.Photograph by Thomas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman / NMCIR / UCSD When the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman died, in early 1988, he left behind a maxim scrawled on the blackboard of his office at Caltech: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” The words have been repeated of