Synthetic Biology: When Genetic Engineering Goes Ballistic

At the moment, what passes for genetic engineering is mere pottering. It means moving genes one at a time from species to species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful as insecticides. True engineering would involve more radical redesigns. Source.

Those of you who thought Craig Ventner was washed up and retired to his island home, may be in for some disillusionment. Instead, Ventner is well-connected with venture capital, and in the forefront of the revolutionary movement known as synthetic biology.

In the short run such engineering means assembling genes from different organisms to create new metabolic pathways or even new organisms. In the long run it might involve re-writing the genetic code altogether, to create things that are beyond the range of existing biology. These are enterprises far more worthy of the name of genetic engineering than today's tinkering. But since that name is taken, the field's pioneers have had to come up with a new one. They have dubbed their fledgling discipline “synthetic biology”. Source.

The potential payoff from achieving mastery over the life-mechanisms of even simple cells, is difficult to overstate. That is why more and more smart money venture capitalists are being drawn to the bright lights of the field.

Dr Ventner reckons he will be able to synthesise a working bacterial genome from scratch within two years. More complex genomes, of the sort that make plants, animals and fungi, will take longer. But they, he thinks, should be possible within a decade. Even this definitive erasure of the distinction between the living and non-living worlds is not, however, the most radical idea in synthetic biology. Some people want to go beyond the toolkit that evolution has provided and create biological systems that work with a chemistry that is not found in natural living things. Source.

Here is an interesting close-up look at this year's Synthetic Biology 2.0 conference from Synthesis blog. Read the linked post, then click around to read descriptions of the entire conference. You may find, as I did, that the comments can also be interesting.

A good place to go to acquire an understanding of what synthetic biologists are doing, is the Santa Fe Institute. Abstracts of a few SFI papers on synthetic biology can be found here, here, here, and here. There are a lot more available, along with the full text pdf files.

If you think you understand the world, you are wrong. If you think you know what tomorrow will be like, based upon what yesterday and today were like--you had better stock up on alprazolam. This roller coaster is almost to the top of the first hill.