Hacking With Synthetic Biology

blackbearnh writes "If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She talked to O'Reilly Radar recently about the benefits and potential dangers of easy biological design, why students should be hacking wetware, and what's involved in setting up your own lab to slice genes."

Uber Geekery

[Jason Levine]

Now that's what I call Uber Geekery. Instead of the tiring work of brushing your teeth, you get minty fresh breath by hacking the smell of the bacteria in your mouth.

Hacking Life Danger

[Yergle143]

As a working biochemist/molecular biologist I cringe at her la-de-da attitude. Making bacteria smell like bananas is cute, so is making a glowing mouse (green fluorescent protein). But abuse is a centimeter away (cloning botulism toxin into the flu virus anyone?) Where I work I have to justify just about everything I do. That's a good thing. If you want to hack biology get into plant breeding... 537

Re:Fine, I'll think of the children

[wizardforce]

My only concern is that we might create some sort of blight in the lab that gets out.

we can also delete/disable genes required for growth outside the lab. As an example, knocking out multiple genes involved in synthesizing nutrients that are not common outside of a lab setting. stack several of these together and the chance the bacteria has of adapting quickly is roughly zero. synthetic biology also allows us to incorporate unnatural amino acids that if not present in the medium, cause protein synthesis to halt at the point missing the correct amino acid. without the amino acid, only smaller snippets of amino acids form rather than the protein and if it is important to the cell, it's going to die.

Re:Doesn't this sound like...

[wizardforce]

all technology has a risk of being missued but if we didn't develop any of that tech because of that fear, then we'd never have developed fire out of fear that it could be used to burn down homes. The haber process which keeps 2 billion people fed and alive today was developed to produce nitrogen compounds used to make munitions to kill people. NO tech in of its self is evil, it is how it is used which is evil.

Re:It's less about "evil" as about "safeguards"

[Moraelin]

All the examples you provided were diseases that had natural origins (the smallpox was intentionally spread, but was not created or spread by scientists), which highlights something key here: if there is going to be a killer virus, it's going to be natural. If someone catches an airborn form of ebola and is infectious while in a major international airport... goodnight. Don't worry about the amateurs, the most dangerous and evil biologist is nature itself.

That's a bit irrelevant, since the capability of genetically engineering a virus was missing until very recently. Even the cold-war era research into it was basically little more than selecting and breeding existing strains.

So, yes, _of_ _course_ the Roman smallpox outbreaks weren't manufactured, because nobody in the world was capable of manufacturing it. Heck, they didn't even know exactly _what_ it is, since it would be another millennium and a half (or so) before anyone even had a microscope.

So basically saying "if there is going to be a killer virus, it's going to be natural" at this point, is a bit like being in the 40's in Japan and saying "if anything's going to destroy half a city, it's going to be a natural disaster. Don't worry, all historical examples have been earthquakes, floods and volcanoes."