Oscillator

Synthetic biology is not a particularly new idea. Scientists and engineers have drawn comparisons between living things and state of the art technological systems for many years, and tried to “recreate” living things using that technology. In the mid 1700’s, industrial mechanization was changing the world, and Jacques de Vaucanson was trying to make mechanical life. His digesting duck was a duck shaped automaton that could eat and digest seeds, pooping just like a real duck. Unfortunately, it was actually a scam duck, with poop from real ducks hidden in a secret compartment that would come out a specified time after “eating” the seeds so there was no real digestion going on.

As our technologies have changed, so too has our knowledge of biology and our attempts at synthetic life. Digital artificial life, robotics and artificial intelligence are starting from technology and trying to get to life, while current synthetic biology starts from life and is trying to get to technology.

Wanted - Home Computers to Join in Research on Artificial Life - NYTimes.com

The ambiguity in the term “synthetic biology” is fascinating. Evelyn Fox Keller points it out as “the conspicuous difference between the production of artificial life and the artificial production of life.” The kind of synthetic biology that I do is closer to the latter definition, changing existing biology in order to do something “useful” (making fuels in my case), and to hopefully learn more about how biology works in general. In my lab we use computer models of cellular processes such as metabolism in order to help inform some of our “design” decisions, something alluded to in the article:

Software simulations that can model evolution could be used by human designers, Mr. Damer argued. “We can’t build cars and airplanes or even toys these days without computer modeling and simulation,” he said. “So why not biochemistry?”

but what do computer models of life mean on their own, without testing the predictions in a real cell, without data from biochemical experiments (no matter how distant from “real” life those may be, but that’s another story)? How does our concept of what life is depend on our unique point of view and how does this affect what we program into our computer models? How is the search for extraterrestrial life tied to the search for the origin of life?

Alexandra DAISY Ginsberg. Beautiful, thoughtful, inspiring.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | A step closer to ‘synthetic life’

There are certainly many more steps to go to make “synthetic life”, but this technology has pretty interesting implications for our fundamental understanding of how cells go from genomes to “life”. How are epigenetic effects involved? How do the proteins and membranes of the recipient cell affect the gene expression? How do you “boot up” a cell without this magical membrane already in place?

Beyond that: how can we make genomes when we have no idea what so much of the genome does? Most genes are not characterized in a way that makes sense for synthetic genomics. Can there be such a thing as “starting from scratch” if we don’t know all of the ingredients?

osmotic growth at light matters