Synthetic biology is about control. Control of cells, control of biological systems, control of genes; understanding how cells control themselves so that we can do it too, in ways that we find useful. As such, synthetic biology isn’t particularly a new idea (we’ve been trying to control our “animal nature” for quite some time…), it’s just that recent technological breakthroughs in gene sequencing and synthesis have made control at a fundamental, molecular level seem just within our reach.
Since going to the FBI conference “Building Bridges Around Building Genomes”, where public safety and national security issues around the possible dangerous uses of synthetic biology technology were discussed, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the idea of control plays into our view of nature and the study of biology, and how all of these ideas are affected by cultural/historical forces. Law enforcement is about control in a way as well, and in recent years much of the focus at the FBI has shifted from responding to crimes to preventing crimes. A significant amount of time at the conference was spent discussing terrorism, and how terrorist organizations in the middle east have expressed interest in using synthetic biology to create terrifying biological weapons. Terrorism is scary, primarily because it is something that we can’t control. Terrorist cells are constantly evolving and adapting to how we can respond to them, changing in ways that we cannot easily predict and cannot easily shut down.
Sound familiar? Bacterial cells are constantly evolving, adapting to whatever chemical warfare we can throw at them, and generally being terrifying. The antibiotics which sixty years ago were seen as the beginning of a new era of control over nature have turned bacteria into a force that in many cases we cannot contain. The focus on synthetic biology as a threat, especially as a terrorist threat, becomes more interesting when thought of in this context. Biology is scary because it evolves in ways we can’t predict, and terrorists are scary because they evolve in ways we can’t predict, but somehow the idea that we can control biology in such a sophisticated way as to create even scarier biological threats with relatively minimal effort is something that is emphasized.
I don’t think synthetic biology will be successful in achieving its goals until the emphasis changes from control to cooperation (maybe this goes for US geopolitical goals as well, but that is not my area of expertise). Can we work with living systems in order to achieve something useful? Can evolution and the unpredictability in living systems be another tool in the synthetic biology “toolkit” instead of something that needs to be eliminated?
