Synthetic Biology

Going where no biologist has going before...

Synthetic biology is a term which has reemerged in the scientific meetings of biological engineers as well as the more popular media. In 1978, Szybalksi and Skalka talked about how the work on restriction enzymes would lead us into a new era of synthetic biology where we could both analyze existing gene structures, but also design our own (1).

Over the past 25 years, most scientific research has been aimed to master the study of existing gene and other existing biological systems. However, over the past 5 to 7 years, there have been many breakthrough technologies enabling the dream of Szybalksi and Skalka to start to become a reality. Today there are many prominent scientists working in the field of synthetic biology and they are spread throughout educational institutions and industry. While these scientist are busy designing new experiments to create novel organisms and processes, they have also sparked discussion about what they are engaged in. The idea that people can rearrange DNA sequences to produce completely novel organisms has lead to controversy over whether people should be engaged in this field of science. Drew Endy, a preeminent synthetic biologist has written, "DNA synthesis has recently helped to enable the 'resurrection' of the 1918 influenza strain, and is now widely believed capable of producing the smallpox genome from publicly available sequence information; variants of these viruses and other pathogens could be readily constructed." (Nature Review Nov 2005) Clearly, there are inherant risks when conducting this science, the question is: should we be engaged in something so potentially dangerous even if it has huge positives.

Figure 1. Scene from Adventures in Synthetic Biology. This is what might happen when you give one organism the genes from another organism...