88 Proof Synth Bio Blog

Word on the street from Synthetic Biology 4.0..  take a word or leave a word.

• Tom Knight mentions it will be another 10 years before an untrained hobbyist can order a BioBrick off the shelf, stir things up, and have them work like a can currently be done for a hobby electronics kit, noting they (the engineers! Applying proper engineering design rules!) have only been at system-level design biology for a couple years.  He suggests anyone interested should do iGEM, using borrowed or scrounged equipment if necessary, but doesn’t know about the startup costs involved.   (Budget would be good to know.)
• Various MIT people again mention the way to get started from scratch in synthetic biology is through iGEM.
• Big open questions (and significantly opposed views) regarding the licensing surrounding biobricks or “open source” parts libraries.
• While everyone bandies about the phrase “open source,” it seems no one actually understands what open source means (or that there are two major camps in open source:  viral innovation-stifling copyleft GPL in which all your work must also be disclosed, and more open Apache/BSD which allows your work to remain private).  A point was made that the intellectual property could be released as public domain, yet authors rarely chose to do so, instead adopting a more complex license.
• I didn’t realize this before, though apparently there is a “humanist” group which is reporting pseudo-scientific fluff regarding genetic engineering & synthetic biology.  I won’t name them as they don’t deserve air time based on the couple sensationalistic & skewed articles they’ve written.
• A very small minority of specialists believe in just going skunk-works style, ignoring the assumed difficulty of engineering biology.  That means, setting up startup-like garage operations while maintaining control of everything.
• Laboratory-created self-mobile molecular machines (aka: synthetic life) is closer to reality than anyone might guess.  Mix the right things into the right places and things which previously were inert will start to move on their own.

All quotes above are not to be taken literally.  Any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.  The contents of this article and this web site (web log) are Copyright with All Rights Reserved.  No content may be used without explicit written permission.  (This is to prevent quoting out of context.)

For those unfamiliar with synthetic biology, this video by Mac Cowell shows Drew Endy explaining the field: