I have been mean­ing to write a post about this for a while (I have sev­eral lined up actu­ally, so stay tuned). Then this morn­ing, walk­ing past a news­pa­per vend­ing machine I noticed that the S.F. Chron­i­cle has a big front page arti­cle on this titled “Do-it-Yourself biol­ogy on rise.” And a month or two back, The New Yorker also did an arti­cle about syn­thetic biol­ogy. So this is obvi­ously start­ing to pen­e­trate the mass media and will grad­u­ally become part of the pub­lic con­scious­ness, just like cloning did in the ‘90s.

One of my inter­ests and a fre­quent sub­ject of my art is the human rela­tion­ship to the nat­ural world and this is a sub­ject I have been fol­low­ing for a while now—Synthetic Biol­ogy being a more recent devel­op­ment that adds another layer to this exis­ten­tial (and/or onto­log­i­cal?) ques­tion: What is Nat­ural and what is Syn­thetic (and does it mat­ter)? I find the most inter­est­ing place to exam­ine is where the two become unclear and syn­thetic biol­ogy fits per­fectly in that dis­com­fort zone.

The New Yorker arti­cle cov­ers the use of syn­thetic biol­ogy to build bet­ter ways of deal­ing with malaria. Many syn­thetic biol­o­gists hope to make off-the-rack com­po­nents for biol­ogy, sim­i­lar to the com­po­nents used in the elec­tron­ics indus­try. With the con­cern over such direct manip­u­la­tion of Nature comes an intense series of “what if” ques­tions about the future of the nat­ural world. Will we be able to engi­neer new species of domes­tic pets? Somwhere between a cat and a par­rot? Bio-fuels that emit harm­less, col­ored clouds of gas from the vehi­cles burn­ing them (just because)? Will we be able to fuse biol­ogy to our electro-mechanical present, cre­at­ing bio­log­i­cal com­put­ers of every shape, size and color imag­in­able? As anx­i­ety induc­ing as syn­thetic biol­ogy may be, the pos­si­bil­i­ties seem end­lessly excit­ing and as we head fur­ther into a bio­log­i­cal future that will be unavoid­ably altered by the grad­ual warm­ing of the Earth, we have no choice but to develop this tech­nol­ogy with the hope that we can solve some of our cur­rent and future needs while being mind­ful of the dan­gers of such fun­da­men­tal power.

Tags: life, Nature?, science, Synthetic

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