"Synthetic Life?" The New Industrial Revolution? (Bioethics Seminar)

From Youtube : Will biological engineering usher in a new industrial revolution? Gregory Kaebnick, a research scholar at The Hastings Center, leads a bioethics seminar on synthetic biology. What is it? Where might it lead? What ethical questions does it raise?

Synthetic biology will bring us a slimy, moist future

The first post i put up on this blog was a quote from Freeman Dyson in 'Many colored glass' and descibed for me where we are heading with biology.  This wired UK article is an excellent article quoting the same source :


.....But those might be the aesthetics we'll have to get used to if Freeman Dyson was right when he wrote this a couple of years ago: "I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next 50 years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous 50 years."....


Read more : http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2009/09/start/synthetic-biology-will-bring-us-a-slimy-moist-future

Synthetic Biology Open Language

I guess these kinds of develeopments are the equivalent of a programming language and standardisation with respect to biological parts :

Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) is a community effort involving University of Washington, BIOFAB, and VirginiaTech (Jean Peccoud). The purpose of the project is to develop computational representations for synthetic biology parts so that they can be efficiently exchanged between research labs. SBOL presently consist of semantics for describing parts and visual styles for visually displaying parts.

The insides of Openpcr

A nice photo of the isides of the openpcr machine. When i find some time i Will construct one myself.

Space Travel and Synthetic Biology

The article gives a hint of applications to come as a result of Synthetic Biology. In this case with respect to space travel. However, I suspect that here on earth we could very well benefit from most of these developments as well :

• microbial community could add cells to produce certain vitamins and proteins needed for long-term space missions.
• eliminate future infections, tooth decay

Read more on arsbiologica : http://www.arsbiologica.org/2010/11/synthetic-biology-and-space-travel.html