'Synthetic biology' holds promise, but doubts simmer

The hottest biomedical buzzword promises new fuel, new drugs and more.

ByABC News
August 31, 2009, 1:33 AM

— -- "Plastics" may have been the Baby Boomer watchword, but "synthetic" rules today.

That's "synthetic" as in synthetic biology, the hottest biomedical buzzword, promising new drugs, new fuel and someday, new life.

"If we can make life, then we understand it," says molecular biologist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla. Starting with the building blocks of animal and plant cells, synthetic biologists are reengineering living things today and hope to create synthetic life tomorrow. The ultimate goal, Benner says, is "synthesizing life from scratch."

That makes experts, including human genome pioneers Craig Venter of Rockville, Md., and Jay Keasling of the University of California-Berkeley, hopeful and cautious at the same time about the promise and peril of the field.

In July, a team led by Carole Lartigue of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., reported the field's latest advance in the journal Science: a way to genetically engineer bacteria, previously considered impossible. "Nobody else has done anything remotely like this before," Venter says.

The immediate application is engineering defanged vaccine strains for use against the bacteria family chosen for the study. But a lot of other ideas are cooking, from saving the planet from global warming to figuring out just how life started in the first place.

The promise

In 1974, oncologist Wac{lstrok}aw Szybalski of the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison coined the term "synthetic biology" as a way to describe biologists shuffling genes among organisms. The term has taken on multiple meanings since then in science, says David Rejeski of the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The public largely has no clue, he says: "Nobody really knows what it is."

One popular definition championed by MIT's Drew Endy, who founded the non-profit Biobrick Foundation, is an engineering one, in which the parts of cells act as the screws, bolts, bricks and mortar of future biology. Others, such as Venter and Harvard's George Church, talk of building completely man-made cells, with parts all made from scratch.