Scientists Ponder Human Impacts of Synthetic Biology

UCSF scientists Chris Voigt, PhD, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, Wendell Lim, PhD, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, and Dyche Mullins, PhD, associate professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, joined nearly 300 other biologists and engineers May 20-22 at UC Berkeley to share the latest triumphs in synthetic biology and to discuss how to ensure that the field's tools are used to benefit society. The Second International Conference on Synthetic Biology brought together some of the world's leaders in biological engineering, biochemistry, quantitative biology, biophysics, molecular and cellular biology, bioethics, policy and governance, and the biotech industry. Synthetic biology focuses on the "engineering" in genetic engineering - the treatment of microbes as packages of genes to be mixed and matched to produce a specific molecule, whether an enzyme, a drug, a fuel or a food additive. Among the presenters were California Institute of Technology President and Nobel laureate David Baltimore, PhD; genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter, PhD; Harvard University geneticist George Church, PhD; and Northwestern University ethicist Laurie Zoloth, PhD. Voigt presented his lab's progress in engineering bacteria to secrete spider silk. Lim chaired a session on health, and provided an introduction to the health significance of synthetic biology research. Mullins talked on efforts to bioengineer artificial cytoskeletons. Last year, the growing field of synthetic biology was given a boost when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced funding for a new Nanomedicine Development Center, to be run jointly by UCSF and UC Berkeley with Lim as the principal investigator. Called the Center for Engineering Cellular Control Systems, the new program aims to understand and apply the fundamental design principles of cellular control systems - such as those involving ubiquitous signaling molecules in cells, known as protein kinases -- to engineer cell-like devices with novel "smart" therapeutic functions. NIH is supporting the new center with $7 million over the next five years. A collaborative effort between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley and UCSF, the synthetic biology conference last week sought to highlight potential applications of synthetic biology, and to guide its future to avoid safety or ethical pitfalls like those that confronted early recombinant DNA technology 30 years ago. At that time, biologists acknowledged the sometimes scary possibilities opened up by recombinant DNA technology, but failed to address them until the tool had been banned by some cities and some research had been put on indefinite hold. A pivotal conference in 1975 in Asilomar, California, belatedly established appropriate safeguards to prevent release of genetically engineered organisms. See the agenda of last week's conference. While US reporters did not attend the Berkeley meeting, the British media showed quite a lot of interest. Reporters from New Scientist, the Guardian, and the journal Nature were among those observing the proceedings. Nature reported online on the meeting May 22, focusing largely on the ethical and safety issues: "The synthetic biologists hope that, by regulating themselves, they can stave off attempts to set controls or limits on the field. The science is moving rapidly: at the meeting, for example, Chris Voigt from the University of California, San Francisco, reported that his lab has engineered Salmonella bacteria to make and secrete protein components - a difficult task made easier by the lab's deliberate simplification of the genetic code for the proteins." Links: Synthetic biologists try to calm fears