When I first read about the synthetic biology field, it was based on the broad news media, BioBricks, and related MIT work. So immediately, I read what I feel is a mistaken metaphor describing the organism/cell/”chassis” as a “hardware” component – which is not a fitting analogy. It doesn’t help that the marketing for BioBricks involves a lot of these metaphors regarding biological circuits, parts, devices, etc. So those in the field are clouding the issue as well, probably with the goal of making things more simple to understand (and avoid religious issues as I mention below). Also, I still get confused when I read papers discussing “probes”. To me, a probe is a metal contact which attaches to an oscilloscope and has a fixed impedance of 50 ohms. In biology, a probe is a chemical. The same can be said for the “tool” analogy — a tool as a noun is a physical device, like a screwdriver, so labeling bioinformatics software as tools only complicates the issue. Traditionally, in a software field, these might be called development tools… to those outside the field, use of the word “tool” is misleading. Sometimes purposely so, in order to land the research capital ($$).

Right now I drafted my definition of hardware to be the physical tools – PCR machine, glassare, even freezer, etc., are hardware. These would be used by end-users in a wetlab, yes. These have high margins now, because of low volume and “mainframe era” pricing structure. The DIY Bio guys want to lower the cost of this hardware significantly, moving towards the “personal computer” era, which will cut the profit margins and increase the volume.

Also true, the goal of the field is to make the host organism generic, maybe even “hot swappable”, so that any compatible biological circuit can be “run” on any compatible host, and synthetic biology will eventually get there but not for several years. It’s still wetware, not hardware. The true synthesis guys (those studying cell-free systems) are the ones who will likely win in the technological standards contest eventually, I think. Why use a host, which requires a more complex system and includes cellular limitations, if the circuit can be used without a host? Currently, host organisms are used because it’s the easiest (sometimes only) way to implement the design, and this comes with a bunch of baggage.

I’ve also run into the biology-related issue that those in the field don’t want to name things according to biology-related terms. At least, it feels like this is a big issue. Is iGEM a genetically engineered machine or is it a genetically modified organism? Is a synthetic circuit a piece of hardware or is it “synthetic life” ? Calling it an organism yields the acronym GMO — which in some realms will get funding immediately cut, due to public misunderstanding and religious zealotry; people in the U.S. are scared of things labeled “GMO”. (Sad fact. Bad Catholicism at work?) A BioBrick “part” could be called a “cellular function” but that would show that there’s a “cell” involved, instead of an abstract “parts circuit” running on abstract “hardware”. These metaphors seem chosen to purposely; one of the benefits is again to land the research capital (by not scaring away the funding).

A lot of other people seem to be using the hardware analogy in biology to refer to the “chassis” or cell. However when people do this, it really breaks down the analogy between the computer and biology marketplaces. The reason is that in the foreseeable future, I cannot see the end user purchasing a hardware “chassis” platform separate from the software DNA – rather they will purchase the complete cell/seed/whatever directly from the wetlab company. So the hardware chassis has significantly less importance as a platform, because a wetlab company would be free to pick their chassis without worrying about the dominance of a particular hardware platform.