Synthetic Biology

By | March 7, 2005
2 Comments

gem-dna.jpgOn Friday, Newsfactor Technology News published an article entitled, “The Bleeding Edge of Computing” which contained this speculation:

Professor Drew Endy in biological engineering at MIT says that soon we will be able to write DNA — perhaps even building and coding living organisms capable of conducting work for us on the nano-scale. It is even possible that programmers might adopt natural coding as a computer language.

“Synthetic biology” means leveraging natural structures as a way of building things on the molecular scale. “If you can write DNA, you’re no longer limited to ‘what is’ but to what you could make,” said Endy. “The science you get out of that is more than ‘Here’s this gene and what it does.’ It’s ‘What are the physical limitations of biological systems?’”

via KurzweilAI

I would expect biological systems to have some physical limitations that would keep them from being the all-purpose nanobots we futurists like to imagine. But what’s to keep an enterprising programmer from writing the code for an organism that eats carbon and excretes petroleum?

Any bets that genetic algorithms won’t be an important tool in this emerging field? Technology is coming full circle.

I recently asked:

How much tweaking is required before we consider a formerly natural organism [like yeast] to be an artificial nanobot?

Possible answer: when we move from tweaking natural genes to writing the code ourselves from scratch.

  • Karl Hallowell

    One problem with engineering natural systems is that they are far more likely to be able to survive in the wild than say something that needs to operate in a hydrocarbon fluid and survives off of high frequency sound waves. Also the interaction of these systems with the cornucopia of living organisms is far less predictable.

    OTOH, the machinery is there, you just need to use it.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Karl:

    Usually stuff that we tinker with for our benefit is less robust than what is found in nature.

    I think that most of the specialized organizms could easily be controlled by giving them certain needs – a need for a particular nutrient not readily available in nature, for example.

    If someone were trying to hurt the environment, it might be possible to design the perfect pest with genetic algorithms. But the scientist would almost have to be trying to do harm. There are much easier ways for a terrorist to cause problems.