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As the race to build life from scratch pushes on, hyperbole drowns out nuanced discussion. We need more wide-ranging dialogue.
EXCITING but terrifying. Powerful but scary. This is what some say about the emerging field of synthetic biology. Not surprising, perhaps, for an initiative that aims to "create life from scratch", to "make life better" and to "make biology easier to engineer".
The goals of synthetic biology are certainly ambitious: to produce a toolbox of standard biological parts with well-characterised functions that can be put together in combinations that may not exist in nature in order to perform human-designed functions outside the laboratory. Some hope to make the parts and the knowledge of how to assemble them accessible to all. The overall aim is to make the engineering of biology a routine process that can be put to use in many industries, with no need for highly specialised skills.
Most ethical, policy and media discussions about synthetic biology start from the assumption that these aims have already been achieved: that biology has become easy to engineer for whatever ends we...
EXCITING but terrifying. Powerful but scary. This is what some say about the emerging field of synthetic biology. Not surprising, perhaps, for an initiative that aims to "create life from scratch", to "make life better" and to "make biology easier to engineer".
The goals of synthetic biology are certainly ambitious: to produce a toolbox of standard biological parts with well-characterised functions that can be put together in combinations that may not exist in nature in order to perform human-designed functions outside the laboratory. Some hope to make the parts and the knowledge of how to assemble them accessible to all. The overall aim is to make the engineering of biology a routine process that can be put to use in many industries, with no need for highly specialised skills.
Most ethical, policy and media discussions about synthetic biology start from the assumption that these aims have already been achieved: that biology has become easy to engineer for whatever ends we...
