Earlier this year, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (Rockville, MD, USA) published the synthesis of an artificial genome for Mycoplasma genitalium, the smallest free‐living bacterium (Gibson et al , 2008). They did not create artificial life, but they did take an important step towards that elusive goal, the most high‐profile and controversial application of synthetic biology. More prosaically, but importantly, synthetic biology also offers the prospect of engineering organisms able to turn refuse into biofuels; scrubbing excess carbon from the atmosphere; creating new drugs, artificial organs and other cell‐based therapeutics; and developing highly efficient biosynthetic catalysts. Not surprisingly, the enormous commercial potential of synthetic biology is beginning to create considerable excitement, reminiscent of the advent of genetic engineering in the 1980s and 1990s. At first sight, it might seem that most of the research and commercialization associated with this new field takes place in the USA. The Biobricks Foundation (Cambridge, MA, USA)—an initiative to standardize the DNA ‘building blocks’ that encode basic biological functions for engineering purposes, and that attracted considerable media and scientific attention—was founded by engineers and scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA, USA), Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA) and the University of California (San Francisco, CA, USA). The USA also contains a considerable number of laboratories and researchers investigating synthetic biology (www.syntheticbiology.org). US scientists and venture capitalists have founded several companies to exploit synthetic biology's commercial potential—such as Synthetic Genomics (La Jolla, CA, USA), Codon Devices (Cambridge, MA, USA) and Amyris (Emeryville, CA, USA). Although it might seem that the USA is ahead in the race to reap the possible benefits of this emerging field, Europe is not necessarily about to lose out. However, the future of synthetic biology in Europe depends as much on regulatory structures, public acceptance, funding and research …