Humans are good at making things.
We make buildings, cars, gadgets, clothes,
gigantic particle colliders, tiny robots... whatever these are
Want a computer that goes on your head
and make you look silly?
We can make it! But here's the thing:
we're actually not the world's best
engineers –
nature is. I mean just look at this gorgeous specimen –
or this one – or this one. Humans have
always been limited by our materials
the things we could extract or refine, while nature has had the building blocks
of life to play with.
We didn't even really know what DNA looked like in the 1950s...
let alone how it worked. But it's 2015,
We now know how to read, write, cut, and
paste
and thus
design DNA to make a living things do what we want them to do.
In short, we've entered the age of synthetic biology.
There's no official definition of
synthetic biology, but here's an
unofficial one:
Synthetic biology refers to both the
design and fabrication of
biological components and systems that
do not exist in the natural world
and the redesign and fabrication of existing biological systems.
What does that mean exactly? Well, it
means we can engineer
E. coli to pump out the antimalarial drug artemisinin, we can make sterile mosquitoes,
we can program microbes to make perfume and biofuels,
we can make plants that glow, and flowers that change color.
And scientists have done all this just
in the past 20 years.
The technology has become so mainstream that every year
hundreds of high school, college,
graduate students compete in an international
synthetic biology competition called
iGEM. Last year, one of the winners designed a microbe to detect
and kill the evil fungus that's been
destroying the world's banana supply.
They didn't actually build the microbe – that would take way longer than the six
months they had for the competition – but they did manage to get part of the way
there
iGEM teams design their creations using
Biobricks
kind of like the Legos of biology –
functional bits DNA that people can mix
and match
as needed. They're more than 20,000 in Biobricks
currently catalogued and that number grows every year.
In fact, everything about this industry
seems to grow every year.
The cost of DNA sequencing and synthesis is plummeting,
the availability of commercial biotech equipment is on the rise,
and synthetic biology enthusiasts say
"this is just the beginning."
Could be one day make trees that grow
plastic fruit?
Could we bring animals back from
extinction? Could we engineer entirely new
organisms?
In theory, these are all possible. But here's
the big,
genetically-engineered elephant in the
room. We could also, in theory,
build a deadly virus or release them
back into the wild that wasn't supposed
to be there
or instigate a new age of
bioterrorism.
So synthetic biology can either be
really, really cool
or really, really scary. And people tend
to fixate on those two extremes.
Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University,
calls this the halfpipe of doom. Back in the early 2000's,
when everyone was freaked out about
anthrax, government officials swayed to
the really, really scared side of the halfpipe.
And they let biohackers know it by
arresting some of them.
Scientists, author, and self-proclaimed
"garage biohacker" Rob Carlson says that a lot of home biologists went dark around this time.
And some are still operating in secret.
So prohibition isn't effective. But then
again, we already knew that.
"We advocate for the repeal of the 18th amendment."
*yeahhhhafahhhhhafhhahf*
In 2010, President Obama's Bioethics Commission
issued a report on Synthetic Biology
acknowledging that the DIY bio community actually played an important role in the
field
and that mean a prohibition nor complete
freedom were a good idea.
And earlier this year, the administration
asked the EPA,
FDA, and USDA to take a fresh look bad
biotech regulations.
But, that'll take a while, so stay tuned. Whatever happens
and wherever you fall on the halfpipe of doom, synthetic biology is happening.
The question is
How will we use it?
Subtitles by the Amara.org community
