Synthetic Biology’s New Menagerie

August 18, 2014

(Harvard Magazine) – Insofar as a common theme unites these diverse creations, it is the transformation of biology into an engineering discipline. Traditional genetic engineering amounted more or less to biological cut-and-paste: scientists could, for instance, transfer a cold-tolerance gene from an Arctic fish into a tomato. Synthetic biology aims for a more radical reorganization. Its organisms are built to be biological machines, with DNA and proteins standing in for circuit components or lines of computer code. In combination, the biological parts perform functions unknown to nature: processing signals, producing new chemicals, storing information.