Synthetic Biology: Life as App Store

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Acknowledgments

I thank Eric Hoffman for helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹Protocell creation is a program of basic science research that is largely peripheral to the applications and commercial ferment around synthetic biology.

²While always, in principle, subject to revision, quantum theory, molecular dynamics, relativity theory, and thermodynamics and statistical physics have provided conceptually coherent accounts and quantitative prediction of the behavior of matter on multiple scales.

³One highly touted strategy involves mass production of billions of variant E. coli genomes that can be scrutinized for favorable phenotypes; see Bohannon (2011). In most scientific disciplines massive trial-and-error protocols would be antithetical to theory-guided research, but in some Darwin-inspired interpretations of biology, it is the essence of the theory (Dennett 1995).

⁴The term “BioBricks” is trademarked by the BioBricks Foundation.

⁵A 2004 News Feature in the journal Nature quotes Tom Knight, a senior computer scientist in the MIT School of Engineering and an originator of the BioBrick notion as stating “An alternative to understanding complexity is to get rid of it.” See Ball (2004).

⁶In The New Atlantis, the father of Salomon's House (a kind of research institute) describes its accomplishments in organism modification as follows: “[W]e practice…all conclusions of grafting, and inoculating, as well of wild-trees as fruit-trees, which produceth many effects. We make them also by art greater much than their nature; and their fruit greater and sweeter and of differing taste, smell, color, and figure, from their nature. And many of them we so order, as they become of medical use. We have also means to make divers plants rise by mixtures of earths without seeds; and likewise to make diverse new plants, differing from the vulgar; and to make one tree or plant turn into another…We have also parks, and enclosures of all sorts, of beasts and birds; which we use not only for view or rareness, but like-wise for dissections and trials, that thereby may take light what may be wrought upon the body of man. Wherein we find many strange effects: as continuing life in them, though divers parts, which you account vital, be perished and taken forth; resuscitating of some that seem dead in appearance, and the like. We try also all poisons, and other medicines upon them, as well of chirurgery as physic. By art likewise we make them greater or smaller than their kind is, and contrariwise dwarf them and stay their growth; we make them more fruitful and bearing than their kind is, and contrariwise barren and not generative. Also we make them differ in color, shape, activity, many ways. We find means to make commixtures and copulations of divers kinds, which have produced many new kinds, and them not barren, as the general opinion is. We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction, whereof some are advanced (in effect) to be perfect creatures, like beasts or birds, and have sexes, and do propagate. Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand of what matter and commixture, what kind of those creatures will arise” (Bacon 1979). The anticipation of the ethos of synthetic biology in these proto-Enlightenment passages is made poignant by the last sentence, which strikes a rationalist chord entirely abandoned in the modern (or postmodern) versions. See Newman (2009b).

⁷DIY bio consists of hobbyists, some with professional training, who convene in studio-like laboratories such as GeneSpace in Brooklyn, New York and BioCurious near San Francisco, California, or even in their own garages or basements.

⁸Significantly, however, in 2011 certain synthetic biology-related manipulations of organisms were excluded from coverage by the NIH Guidelines at the request of the pharmaceutical industry. See http://www.selectagents.gov/resources/13.Jacqueline_Corrigan-Curay%20CDC%20FINAL%20Talk.pdf.

⁹Mapping the Emerging Synthetic Biology Landscape (Synthetic Biology Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, 2011), www.synbioproject.org/library/inventories/map/.

¹⁰ http://www.cbd.int/doc/emerging-issues/Int-Civil-Soc-WG-Synthetic-Biology-2011-013-en.pdf.

¹¹See the online interview of Venter in Scientific American, subheaded: “The geneticist and entrepreneur hopes to use synthetic biology to transform microscopic algae into cells that eat up carbon dioxide, spit out oil and provide meals.” (Biello 2011).

¹²Another prominent synthetic biology researcher, Drew Endy, formerly at MIT and now at Stanford, asked, in an interview with a New Yorker reporter, “What if we could liberate ourselves from the tyranny of evolution by being able to design our own offspring?” (Specter 2009, 61).

¹³A range of these views is contained in a special issue on synthetic biology of the journal Biological Theory (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/biot/4/4).

¹⁴The evolutionary biologist John Avise wrote in 2004, “Despite nearly three decades of experience with recombinant DNA techniques, the ultimate contribution to the broader human enterprise remains uncertain” (Avise 2004, 177).

¹⁵An analogy is the impossibility of understanding how the U.S Constitution functions without any knowledge of U.S. history.