What exactly is synthetic biology?

The emerging discipline of synthetic biology faces a similar definition problem. It is, as it says on the label, about synthesizing the living. This is a major change of direction, as biology has spent the entire 20th century following the highly successful doctrine of reductionism and dissection of organisms into functional units down to the biomolecules, in a bid to understand what makes them tick. Now that biologists have a large number of building blocks of life at their disposal, they can start putting them back together, either to understand the higher-order functions (an endeavour known as systems biology) or to create variations of the existing life forms with new or improved functions, which we now call synthetic biology.

It’s in the process of creating life from natural and synthetic building blocks that the views of synthetic biology begin to diverge. Which parts of life are the building blocks and which are the essence of life? One could, for instance, argue that life is in the genomes, and the whole phenotype is just the toolkit they use to survive and replicate. Conversely, one could see the organism as the essential unit and the genome as its data storage facility. Different views on the meaning of ‘life’ will lead to different definitions of ‘synthetic biology’.

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