The fabulous and squirm-inducing new installment of Radiolab got me thinking a lot about our changing relationship with biology. As in gross stuff.
Hookworm infection is a huge problem around the world, keeping children anemic and out of school, not allowing them to reach their full potential. Eradication of hookworm through hygiene and plumbing was a huge success for industrialized nations. However, now scientists are starting to learn that carrying a few hookworms in your gut might be good for you, preventing allergies and asthma and maybe even improving more serious diseases with an autoimmune component such as multiple sclerosis! In the push to clear the gross stuff out of our lives, our bodies rebelled.
In many ways, synthetic biology is trying to bring biology back into our lives, to use microorganisms to do all kinds of things in our factories, our homes, and even in our bodies, where maybe it belonged all along. Maybe the future of synthetic biology lies less in the definition of synthetic as “made by humans” but with synthetic as bringing together many different types of living things to all work together to make a better whole.
