Oscillator

The Aesthetics of Synthetic Biology

What does it mean for something to be “well designed”? What does it mean for a living system to be “elegant” or “beautiful”? How do taste, culture, and subjective opinions about aesthetics mix with the “objective” nature of science and technology? These questions are really important to me, and I’m fascinated by how they are being addressed by the synthetic biology community and by artists and other non-scientists. I heard about Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, a designer who explores issues in synthetic biology through art and design, at the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center retreat, and I recently found some of the videos she made. The first is the most well-made video introduction to synthetic biology “dogma” that I’ve seen. Great animations and enormous trust in the ability of synthetic biology to do anything. The most interesting part comes at the very end, where she introduces the idea of how our notion of the tree of life is constructed, and begins to explore how synthetic biology may necessitate the modification of the tree of life, how synthetic life-forms will be a new part of our Nature.

The Synthetic Kingdom from Daisy Ginsberg on Vimeo.

The second video is a more artistic exploration into the more icky side of synthetic biology. How will we interact with new products that are made from biology? How will our notions of hygiene and sterility have to change if many of the things we use in our daily life go from actually synthetic to synthetic biology, as much of the hype around synthetic biology claims?

BIOME from Daisy Ginsberg on Vimeo.

Truth and Beauty

Paul Krugman’s recent NYTimes Magazine article, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” starts with criticizing economists for confusing beauty for truth in the simplified mathematical models of market economies. I’ve been thinking a lot about “beauty” and “elegance” in science since overhearing a discussion of synthetic biology where someone said that it would be possible for scientists to come up with a more “elegant” solution to biological information processing than already exists in evolved living systems.

In science (particularly physics), elegance is defined as mathematical simplicity. Here’s a fun TED talk by Murray Gell-Mann all about it beauty and truth in physics:

I think that systems biology is driven by a similar underlying principle; the idea that there is an underlying beauty to living systems that can be explained by simple, beautiful equations. Synthetic biology has been described as the “electrical engineering” to systems biology’s “physics” and I think it’s mainly for this reason. Synthetic biology aims to take the “fundamentals” from systems biology and turn them into an engineering discipline, where the simple equations that govern living systems can be used to design new ones.

Unfortunately, I think the notion that there is underlying simplicity in biological systems is flawed. This is demonstrated best in the work of that most famous physicist turned biologist, Francis Crick. Crick discovered the “central dogma of molecular biology,” a beautifully simple description of how heredity works, where DNA can replicate itself, is transcribed into RNA, which can then be translated into proteins that make up the functions of living cells.

His discovery was tremendous, but in the decades since Crick coined the phrase, the uni-directional, dogmatic simplicity has turned into a chaotic jumble. RNA can make DNA, RNA can act like some proteins, proteins can alter how genes are expressed and how RNAs are processed and more, and there are likely many more complicating factors that have yet to be discovered. In a way, it’s still beautiful, but it’s definitely not simple, and all of these complexities definitely make synthetic biology very challenging, but also fascinating in terms of what we can learn. By trying to understand why even the most successful synthetic biological systems fail to behave exactly as predicted, we may be able to more deeply understand the complexity inherent in biological systems and realize that stripping it away is counterproductive. We’re lucky that so far the failure of oversimplified biological models, unlike the consequences of sticking to oversimplified economic models, only really hurts the graduate students working on the project.

Synthetic Biology 1’s and 0’s

I’m fascinated by the ways that people discuss biological engineering, the language that they use to talk about what cells, proteins, and DNA do. Often, these words come from computer engineering: DNA is the code, proteins are machines, cells can interact to form networks, etc.

A recent article in the UK version of Wired points out that even though we like to talk about biology as machines, the reality is that while “the 1s and 0s of software live in shiny metals shielded by colourful plastics; biological data lurks in dampness, in pipettes and test tubes.” How does the grossness associated with bacteria affect how synthetic biology and biotechnology are received?

I love the idea that if the domestication of biotechnology is going to dominate our life for the next 50 years, as Freeman Dyson predicts, the aesthetics and perceptions surrounding biology are going to change dramatically. Will germophobes be the new luddites? Will bacteria be beautiful? How about lab supplies?