Word on the street from Synthetic Biology 4.0.. take a word or leave a word.
- DIY Bio such as Garage Hacking Biobricks – it’s not for grandma or the kids or even the DIY hackers. It’s not an issue with access to tools, access to research, access to equipment, or access to a lab. It’s lack of experience which will hamper any real results from the “I want to do DIY Bio”. It could take an untrained bio hacker “years” to complete a simple new project since the design will be full of dead ends, whereas the trained (postdoc) scientist would complete similar tasks in a couple months.
- Standard biological parts won’t solve everything, they could solve some things.
- At least the belief that there’s a lot of doubt that standard biological parts could ever come to fruition, especially considering everyone sends everything to “the registry” which presumably can’t handle the burden of filling in all the gaps in everyone’s parts.
- Hong Kong’s Ministry of Finance says he likes synthetic biology and believes in pledging lots of resources to the field even though he says he doesn’t really know what it is; the venture capitalists tell him it’s a good idea.
- Free t-shirts.
- Free Biobricks Foundation stickers.
- Biologists are touchy about the “god” subject and about the “what is life?” subject. Funny, I don’t know a single astrophysicist who is touchy about the “is the earth flat?” subject.
- Some people adamantly believe that Biobricks are way too much baggage to be carrying around to solve an enzymatic problem (“we don’t need all these stinkin’ genes”).
- Lots of software aided design tools for point-click-drag-drop-the-Biobrick-done! Somehow, if it were really that easy, I would have expected the “grandma can DIY bio” argument to hold.
- Students originating from foreign countries and heading to the U.S. to study biology have big visa issues. Security level orange! Banana-smelling e. coli detected! We have an issue possibly brewing from the baker’s yeast!
- Certain venture capitalists looove synthetic biology, and believe it is a far different capitalizing model than traditional genetic engineering or chemical engineering fields.