Sorry for the slow posting, starting a blog while writing up my thesis was not my best idea ever.

While i’m obviously biased on this one, drew just posted a nice rant on The Seven Stones (Nature MSB’s blog) — scroll down to the comments. he tries to maintain a clear definition of synthetic biology, along with notes tossed in about the challenge of convincing editors/scientists that biological engineering should actually contain boring ol’ engineering w/o needing a new scientific discovery tacked on to get published.

If you’d like to get incensed about it you can check out the review on synthetic biology by Luis Serrano published in Nature MSB. My favorite part:

Thus, in my opinion, we should consider a more relaxed use of the term engineering in which the emphasis should be placed on the design and simulation of the new functions and properties, rather than on the standardization of parts.

I’d rather not relax engineering for biology’s sake — fundamental engineering principles have allowed us to tame plenty of other substrates, we’ll get there with biology as well. As a reminder, this was the transistor in 1948 - this stuff isn’t supposed to be pretty at the beginning.

Posted: April 13th, 2008 under Synthetic Biology.
Comments: 2