Seeker Blog

…I’m a geneticist, I write code… “scientist” in “Red Planet”

Lee Silver wrote a fairly useful Newsweek piece on developments in synthetic biology [“SynBio”]. I expected very little from Newsweek, but Dr. Silver did a pretty good job [he is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton].

I’ve been following [better said, attempting to follow…] the pioneering efforts of Prof. Drew Endy of MIT. Endy is the prime mover behind the BioBricks Foundation and openwetware. The aim of the BioBrick™ program is an open source [!!] catalog of standard biological parts that bio-engineers can design into innovative new life [i.e., Life 2.0]. Unlike evolved natural life, BioBrick™ parts come with a “user manual”, have well-defined interconnects and transform behavior. Think of the biologic equivalents of NAND gates or inverters but typically with proteins as inputs/outputs in place of logic levels.

For more background, see this 8 Jan, 2007 post which goes into some detail on Endy and synthetic biology. From an interview with Dr. Endy on Futures in Biotech 8:

…in 10 years we’ll have the technology to construct human genomes - from scratch. …So what the genetic engineer of the future wants is a laptop computer hooked up to a database of standard bio-parts. On that computer I want to run software that allows me to mix and match the parts to define a big piece of DNA that will be the program for the bio-system I want to build. The design I develop with my program gets shipped to a DNA synthesis company which ships the finished DNA back to me by overnight express. Think of chip design/chip fab — but for living systems.

Also in the Newsweek issue is this essay by computer scientist, scifi author Rudy Rucker Our Synthetic Futures: What might happen if we repurpose biology to our own ends? [speculation, not science].

Technorati Tags: SynBio, Synthetic Biology