‘Building a good life’ takes on new meaning with synthetic biology

Image by jurvetson via Flickr

Synthetic biology is a kind of a garage-band approach to genetic engineering. Little snippets of function-specific DNA called “BioBricks,” some created from scratch like a computer program, are used to engineer organisms for specific purposes. Bacteria that make diesel-fuel? No problem, already on the drawing board.

Synthetic biology is accelerating with all the speed one would expect when venture capital gets poured on a volatile mix of technological power and youthful exuberance. Colleges even send teams of student-engineers to compete in the iGEM: International Genetically Engineered Machine Competitions. Rather than sophisticated labs full of eminent white-coated scientists,

even the most sophisticated custom-built life forms can be assembled from a catalog of standardized parts: namely, connectable pieces of DNA called BioBrick parts, which snap together like Legos. Ideally you wouldn’t even need to know anything about DNA to manipulate it, just as a 5-year-old doesn’t need to understand the chemical composition of the plastic in his Legos to build a fortress on the living-room carpet.

via Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering – NYTimes.com.

The NY Times writes about one team, from a two-year college no less, at the current iGEM who tried to build a bacterial battery by linking two designer-bacterium; one to make and secrete sugar powered by sunlight, the other to generate an electric charge from the sugar the other produced.  Totally clever. And while this team came close but no cigar, something like it will probably be built soon.

Of course, with hackers moving from telephones to computer networks to the genetic legacy gifted us by millions of years of evolution, there are inevitable ethical and practical alarms:

The rise of synthetic biology only intensifies ethical and environmental concerns raised by earlier forms of genetic engineering, many of which remain unsettled. Given synthetic biology’s open-source ethic, critics cite the possibility of bioterror: the malicious use of DNA sequences posted on the Internet to engineer a new virus or more devastating biological weapons. ETC Group, an international watchdog that has raised complicated questions about synthetic biology since its earliest days, also warns of the potential for “bio-error”: what unintended and unimaginable consequences might result from deploying all these freely reproducing, totally novel organisms into the world? What if those living machines don’t work exactly as planned?

via Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering – NYTimes.com.

Not to minimize the potential horror of living in a bio-error grey-goo world ruled by out-of-control synthetic organisms doing something like converting sunlight into something other than sugar, like arsenic let’s say, there is also an aesthetic component to successful BioBricks that makes me really uncomfortable. And I’m writing this because I want to ruin your day as well.

I just don’t like thinking of myself—and thinking of you—as being nothing more than the building block for someone else’s project. I hate that Google takes what we used to think of as “personal information” and turned it into the raw material for their advertising empire. But at least there we are responsible, we could opt-out and insist on a better future than the one being built for us by those Jared Lanier calls “digital Maoists.” We didn’t have to exchange our privacy, the information that makes us unique individuals, for free access to neat software. But we did. With synthetic biology we don’t get a choice. We are inevitably being turned into raw material; first for someone else’s science project and then for the multi-national corporation that will be built from someone else using our shared DNA legacy to build a better widget.

But I guess there’s nothing to be done about it so, unlike with Google, I better start scanning the news for when those BioBrick IPOs start coming down the pike.