Scientists have a strange relationship with creativity. Scientists are supposed to just “uncover Nature’s secrets”, but will still recognize when an experiment did so in a “creative” way. Anyone who has tried to build a story out of their experiments for presentation or publication knows that the transition from test tubes to data to fact involves a lot of creativity and work. In the 1970s Bruno Latour did an anthropological study of a lab as they went through this process. His book about it, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts is a fascinating look at the interplay between “uncovering” and “creating” facts about biology.
With synthetic biology, creativity and discovery are linked. We must physically construct biology in order to uncover and construct new facts. Synthetic biology has been around for a long time (more on that later), and I think the current version is enabled by a lot of the technology that has been developed over the past 50 years to really do it. But ”ideas are cheap” and right now, synthetic biology is still mostly an idea.
