• An emerging field of science promises to reveal how life is created and how it can be re-created, for many varied purposes: to help us heal without prescription medications, grow meat without harvesting animals, and engineer our families when nature fails us. That field, synthetic biology, has a singular goal: to gain access to cells in order to write new and better biological code
• In the 20th century, biologists focused on taking things apart (tissue, cells, proteins) to learn how they functioned. This century a new breed of scientists is instead attempting to construct new materials out of life’s building blocks.
• Together, biologists, engineers, computer scientists, and many others have forged a genesis machine: a complex apparatus of people, research labs, computer systems, government agencies and businesses that are creating new interpretations, as well as new forms, of life.
• Synthetic biology will allow us not only to read and edit DNA code but to write it - which means soon we’ll be able to program living, biological structure as though they were tiny computers
• It’s been possible to edit DNA code since the early 2010s using CRISPR-Cas9, but researchers can’t directly see the changes being made to the molecule they’re working on and each move requires lab manipulations to be experimentally validated (time consuming)
• Synthetic biology digitlises the manipulation process. DNA sequences are loaded into software tools (text editor for DNA code) making edits as simple as using a word processor. After the DNA is written and edited, a new DNA molecule is printed from scratch through a 3D printer.
• Synthetic biology allows us to program biological systems like we program computers
• The DNA stores genetic instructions in cells, but requires RNA to tell the cell’s factory what the DNA wants it to do.
• MRNA attached itself to the ribosome and looks for the biological equivalent of the ‘start’ button. The ribosome works throught the strand of mRNA, reading each three-letter set, until it find the ‘stop’ button. All the while the protein is being produced.
• If the cell is a futuristic factory, the genome is a futuristic operating system where genes can be switched on or off
• Once we can speak and manipulate the language of biology, we will have a say in what’s happening inside of cells - we’ll have the power to write new instructions, to have those instructions delivered and produce new biological products on the other side.