The Realities of Synthetic Biology

If you pay attention to the biofuels efforts in the Bay Area or read online science magazines such as Wired or New Scientist, it’s likely you’ve heard of Synthetic Biology. More of a movement than a field, Synthetic Biology envisions biology as an engineering discipline waiting to happen. Essentially, Synthetic Biology aims to circumvent or control the complexities in biology in order to build novel, effective biological systems reliably and quickly for such applications as diesel production and tumor killing bacteria. For example, imagine you want to engineer yeast to make red beer that tastes like lemon. Synthetic biology would have you pick up a “red” gene and a “lemon” gene, plug them into the yeast in a standardized, programmed way, and presto: Red lemon hefeweizen! Unfortunately, the realities of biology require much more than that. In reality, biology is so complex, few things we do ever work as expected or intended. Because of this, most synthetic biology projects quickly run into difficulty and often take years to hack together. But this hasn’t stopped synthetic biologists from making broad claims about the potential of their approaches. It’s been said that cheap biofuels, cures for diseases, and fantastic new biotechnologies are in the pipeline. Recently, however, Synthetic Biologists are encountering resistance as reality has begun to catch up to the hype.

A recent news feature in Nature Biotechnology asked some of the most prominent synthetic biologists how they define their field. The diversity and vagueness of the responses highlighted the difficulties the community has had centering itself on a set of focused objectives. Because Synthetic Biology is such a new field with no central discovery to mark its launch point, and because the application of systematic engineering to biology is so fraught with problems, the Synthetic Biology community has had trouble defining itself in concrete terms. This comes despite such efforts as the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), an NSF-funded consortium of faculty across various universities that is intended to facilitate joint research efforts within Synthetic Biology. Some responses in the article suggested that Synthetic Biology had become more of a buzzword meant to garner federal research dollars than a productive field. For those of us in the field at the moment, this hit painfully close to home.

I enrolled in the UCSF/UC-Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering largely because it boasted the largest and most promising Synthetic Biology faculty in the world. Before that, I worked for a year with a prominent member of the field at MIT where I started to get a sense of the field. As a biochemist, I was taken aback at the engineering jargon and oversimplification I felt was being applied to systems I knew were very complex and incompletely studied. But the positive efforts I witnessed far outweighed the negatives. One tremendously successful Synthetic Biology effort has been the International Genetic Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, which challenges teams of undergraduates, graduates, and even high school students to undertake a genetic engineering project over a summer. Arguably the only “biology competition” in the world, the masterfully executed iGEM competition and jamboree thrills both students and participating faculty with the potential of Synthetic Biology. The iGEM competition relies heavily on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a large, open library of genetic engineered parts, largely submitted by iGEM students. The idea behind the Registry is that students and scientists can use the submitted parts in the Registry to build upon other groups’ work and thereby avoid replicating efforts. It was impressive efforts such as iGEM and the Registry, together with excellent work by highly reputable scientists and engineers that convinced me to stay and contribute to synthetic biology.

Though Synthetic Biology is facing increasing criticism, I readily defend it as the most promising approach to engineering biology. Though there are many difficulties with engineering biology, Synthetic Biology has made the most prominent and daring attempt at solving some of these challenges. Having worked in the field for several years now, I am consistently impressed by the dedication with which Synthetic Biology’s proponents approach its challenges on a daily basis. Most are serious scientist and engineers, tackling and slowly solving real problems. Synthetic Biology should tone down its promises and refocus itself on solving key issues with engineering systems, but it should not be dismissed. Harnessing the powers of biology will take more work than even Synthetic Biology’s critics realize, but Synthetic Biology has made the first few steps, and the payoff should be well worth the struggle. We should be patient and let it struggle onward.