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What’s in a name?


Synthetic biology has been used to describe many scientific activities for the past hundred years, and is still far from a concrete definition. Nature biotechnology asked 20 experts in the field how they define synthetic biology, leading to a great article that highlights many of the different pursuits of synthetic biology researchers as well as the common emphasis on engineering principles. Kristala Prather sums it up nicely in her response: “If you ask five people to define synthetic biology, you will get six answers.”


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“If biological engineering were aviation, it would be at the birdman stage: some observation and some understanding, but largely naive mimicry. For the field to really take flight, it needs the machinery of synthetic biology.”
— Unbottling the genes, editorial from a special issue of Nature Biotechnology on synthetic biology

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“Are these microchips really behaving like neurons? Or has the simulation taken a shortcut, and turned our neurons into dumb little microchips? Because we sometimes forget that the “mind is like a computer” metaphor is only a metaphor. The mind is really just a piece of meat.”
— Reverse-Engineering : The Frontal Cortex

Tags: neurosciencemetaphorscomputers
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