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Here be dragons With luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological pet PAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home. GeneDupes business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination. Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupes team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”. Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about processing information—in one case electronic; in the other, biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail. That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts list—mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly, and so on. Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupes scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animals genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing—first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult. Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupes enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupes scientists can add a little evolution to their products. Each computer starts with a search image (dragon, unicorn, gryphon, etc), and the genome of the real animal most closely resembling it (a lizard for the dragon,