Synthetic biology: discovering new worlds and new words.

Abstract

In the year 1493, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) returned from his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean with news of an unexplored land in the west. Most Europeans were convinced that Columbus had discovered a ‘new world’, yet it was not new at all. Some 400 years earlier, the Norse explorer Leif Ericson (circa 970–1020) had probably been the first European to set foot on North American soil, and some thousands of years earlier, the continent was populated by humans who had crossed the Bering Strait from Asia. > For many of its practitioners, the answer is clear: synthetic biology is about engineering and not about science… The ‘discovery’ of America in the late fifteenth century came to mind when engineers, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA, USA), started talking about a new discipline, which they called synthetic biology (Endy, 2005; Andrianantoandro et al , 2006). This term has subsequently evoked many great expectations, as its application might help to solve numerous social and environmental problems. However, it has also triggered the type of public alarm that molecular biologists are all too familiar with after the bitter debates about genetically modified organisms in the 1990s (Jansson, 1995; Ramos et al , 1994). So, can synthetic biology really be called a new field, or is it just the intensification of the genetic engineering of organisms that biologists have been carrying out since the 1970s? What is genuinely novel about this allegedly newborn discipline? The term synthetic biology was coined in 1912 by the French chemist Stephane Leduc (1853–1939; Leduc, 1912); however, it has only recently become an umbrella term to describe the interface between molecular biology and hard‐core engineering (Andrianantoandro et al , 2006). Synthetic biology is becoming an inclusive theoretical and technical framework in which to approach biological systems …