Synthetic Biology: Cultural Divide

May 9, 2014

(Nature) – Currently based at the software-design firm Autodesk in San Francisco, California, Hessel represents an increasingly impatient and outspoken faction of synthetic biology that believes that the patent-heavy intellectual-property model of biotechnology is hopelessly broken. His plan relies instead on freely available software and biological parts that could be combined in innovative ways to create individualized cancer treatments — without the need for massive upfront investments or a thicket of protective patents. He calls himself a “catalyst for open-source synthetic biology”.