Description
Synthetic Biology (SB) is a revolutionary discipline with a vast range of practical applications, but is SB research really based on engineering principles? Does it contributing to the artificial synthesis of life or does it utilise approaches sufficiently advanced to fall outside the scope of biotechnology or metabolic engineering? This volume reviews the development of SB and includes the major milestones of the discipline, the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches towards the construction of an artificial cell and the development of the “iGEM” competition. We conclude that SB is an emerging field with extraordinary technological potential, but that most research projects actually are an extension of metabolic engineering since the complexity of living organisms, their tight dependence on evolution and our limited knowledge of the interactions between the molecules, actually make life difficult to engineer. Foreword by Michel Morange Preface 1. What is synthetic biology? Engineering ideals and synthetic life Challenges for synthetic life References 2. What was synthetic biology? Life and matter Spontaneous generation The synthesis of living beings a century ago Creating life: utopia and propaganda References 3. What is life? Why wonder what life is? A single example of life Real is a small part of the possible Extant is a clue for the extinct Individual and collective life Being alive and being a living being Awakening from the Cartesian dream References 4. Strategies for making life Frankenstein and Werker: two strategies to make a living being la Frankenstein: artificial synthesis of life or the top-down approach la Werker: synthesis of artificial life or the bottom-up approach Synthesizing life as we do not know it References 5. Synthetic biology in action Virus and malaria to begin with Playing God with a chromosome? Cell circuitry Cooling down the cool engineer Biofuels Armpit cheese or public-oriented research in the name of synthetic biology Beyond practical uses References 6. The iGEM competition iGEM -synthetic biology for the youngest scientists From Briobrick to JamboreeThe outcome and the future References 7. Are we doing synthetic biology? A word on genomes: are we true writers? Is life engineerable? Standards in biology -the iGEM competition References Postface by Ricard Sol Onomastic index Subject index
