AAAS Lecture: Synthetic Life Research Shows Progress—And Raises Questions

Scientists are becoming increasingly adept at using synthetic building blocks to design and construct living systems, an effort with great promise for the engineering of microbes to make drugs or other valuable products. But the emerging discipline of synthetic biology also has some experts worried about the accidental or deliberate creation of harmful organisms.

While synthetic biology is still a young field, it has proved to be very engaging for students, said Pamela Silver, a professor in the Department of Systems Biology at the Harvard Medical School, during a lecture at AAAS. For example, she said, in a recent competition a team from the University of Texas designed a biofilm with bacteria engineered to fluoresce in response to a light-encoded image. The first picture on their small lawn of bacteria was the words “Hello World.”

But the enthusiasm for synthetic biology must be tempered with questions about potential misuse, said Lisa N. Geller, an attorney with the law firm WilmerHale who has a PhD in biology.

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