Synthetic biology has only just begun, says Oliver Morton
way of structuring matter at a molecular scale by slotting each atom into its needful place. It is a way of controlling flows of energy on every scale from that of the smallest living cell to that of the whole living planet. It is a way of growing order and surprise in a universe that in all other respects tends towards entropic stagnation. And it is a thicket of limits on how long lives can last and how much life can accomplish.
The key enabling technology for synthetic biology is the ability to write new chemical messages on to fresh bits of tickertape, rather than just move nature’s old messages from genome to genome. Machines capable of synthesisingletter by letter started to appear in the late 1980s. A decade later there were companies offering to write out almost any sequence ofletters you asked for and courier them straight to you.
The second ingredient that went into synthetic biology came from academics who were thinking along similar lines in the opposite direction; instead of trying to work round natural mechanisms they wanted to work towards recreating them. They were particularly interested in the systems by which cells turn genes on and off. Only when a gene is on, or “expressed”, will a cell make the protein described by that gene’s tickertape sequence.
Amid all this revolutionary talk, young companies in the field made a fateful decision to plunge into biofuels. It seemed a noble undertaking: biofuels could usher in the new technology of life while making good the damage done by the old technology of industrial machines. And governments were keen to subsidise them. But scaling up the pathways that produced hydrocarbons by the gram in the lab to the scale of millions of litres proved even more difficult than expected.
One was new gene-editing technologies—ways of doctoring existing tickertape a letter at a time. In 2000 there was none; now there is a whole range, and those based on a molecule calledhave proved particularly powerful and easy to use . This has breathed new life into the idea of making precise changes to genomes, which is what synthetic biology is all about. It has opened new fields for biological research and new investors’ wallets .synthesis, on the other hand, was widely foreseen.
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