Genomics and Society: Reinventing Life?

The engineering of biology has received new attention with the rise of synthetic biology. This session aims to explore the role of engineering in this field, examining issues such as: what exactly is meant by the desire to turn biology into an engineering discipline? How does the engineer’s approach to discovery and complexity differ from the biologist’s? To what extent is synthetic biology continuous with earlier and extant bio-engineering fields, such as genetic, protein and metabolic engineering?

Chair: Dr Peter Robbins, Innogen, Open University
Respondent: Dr Martyn Amos, Manchester Metropolitan University

What is new and what is not new in the emerging field of synthetic biology? How does synthetic biology relate to other biological sub-disciplines like genetic engineering, systems biology, and origins of life research? What are the programmatic objectives of synthetic biology, and how do they relate to the way synthetic biologists understand life? Are synthetic biology and evolutionary biology complementary disciplines? Is synthetic biology truly synthetic? How does biology relate to engineering, and how genuinely biological is synthetic biology? Will synthetic biology fulfil its aims, and if so, how will we know it?

A whole range of interesting questions arise when considering the philosophical basis of synthetic biology. This paper engages with these questions and suggests possible ways in which they may be fruitfully addressed. In the course of the examination of these questions, this paper also strives to flesh out the basic epistemic and ontological presuppositions informing synthetic biology research in order to situate the field in its appropriate historical and philosophical contexts. In this way, this paper attempts to offer potential resources for making sense of the nature of synthetic biology, where it is coming from, and where it is going.

Synthetic biology in its various current incarnations is in many respects continuous with previous bioengineering efforts such as genetic engineering from the mid-1970s and protein engineering from the late 1980s. The greater scale of its ambitions, however, brings into sharp focus fundamental questions concerning the nature of biological systems such as cells. How are we to make sense of the processes they involve?

The accomplishments of molecular cell biology, for example its illumination of the principles underlying the cell cycle, are unquestionably impressive. To view the cell as a collection of semi-autonomous molecular mechanisms – if we take that to be the standard contemporary stance – does not obviously represent a wholly impotent strategy, then. Some argue, however, that addressing satisfactorily the fundamental properties of metabolism, genome replication and cell division requires that we take into account in an explicit way the integrated and circular nature of cellular causality. I shall reflect on the conditions for success of the molecular cell biological outlook, and on whether the sense of mechanism it involves can be reconciled with the requirements of other, more holistic, theoretical orientations. I shall also consider how a biologically meaningful view of mechanisms relates to the largely solid-state products of macroscopic material engineering and to the syntax-driven abstractions of software engineering.

One of the often-expressed aims of the emerging field of synthetic biology is to ‘make biology into an engineering discipline’. This paper explores what is meant by this objective. It looks at how the engineering approach has exhibited itself in the ‘BioBricks’ school of synthetic biology, which attempts to apply the principles of standardisation, decoupling and abstraction to biology. The aim is to develop interchangeable, modular components, and ultimately to construct biological systems which are manipulable and instrumentalizable, in a way which mimics the (apparently) obvious success of engineering.

There is disagreement about the extent to which such a ‘nuts and bolts’ view will successfully transfer to the study of complex biological systems. A key objective of the engineering approach is to reduce biological complexity, but some commentators think that in their attempts to do this, synthetic biologists will end up eliminating the emergent properties that make living systems what they are.

Focusing on the tensions between biology and engineering in this way, may, however, miss some interesting subtleties. Although much synthetic biology appears to be driven by the assumption that engineering is more successful than biology, some synthetic biologists point out that there are ways in which biological systems are actually better than engineered systems (in terms of their robustness, for example). In these ways the study of biology can perhaps contribute to the development of engineering knowledge.