A really neat and surprisingly detailed article in The New York Times about autophagy, how cells constantly break down and recycle different parts of themselves.
The article points out many of the connections between autophagy and diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer, and goes into some of the details of this incredibly complex cellular machinery. What kind of technological advances or changes in our conception of synthetic biology would we need in order to recreate something of this complexity? What happens when we abstract away these kinds of critical details? What are we missing in our picture of the inner workings of the cell when we think about synthetic biology? These kinds of intricate machines and molecular details are what got me into biology in the first place, but I’ve been pulling away from this kind of depth since I started graduate school. One thing I’m looking forward to as synthetic biology evolves is where the top-down approach of biochemistry will eventually meet up with the bottom-up approach of synthetic biology. Will we reach a similar understanding, or will we find that what we’re focusing on aren’t the “real” fundamentals?
