Hello World!

Hello! I'm so excited to be joining the ScienceBlogs community! I'll be focusing mostly on synthetic biology, defined in the past decade as two main approaches to life science research:

One uses unnatural molecules to reproduce emergent behaviours from natural biology, with the goal of creating artificial life. The other seeks interchangeable parts from natural biology to assemble into systems that function unnaturally. Either way, a synthetic goal forces scientists to cross uncharted ground to encounter and solve problems that are not easily encountered through analysis.

(from Benner and Sismour, 2005)

My definition is a usually little more open and historically accepting, encompassing all genetic and metabolic engineering, origin of life research, and basically anything that has ever tried to recreate or redesign living systems. Synthetic biology and biologically inspired engineering (and biologically inspired design and art) are affecting how we think about life and how we study it, and I'm thrilled to have the chance to discuss it here with all of you!

More like this

I got a lot of interesting responses to my post about DIYbio and how modeling innovation in biotech on computer hacker culture may lead to a science that is less "democratized" than what is being proposed. My friend Adam pointed me to Jaron Lanier's work criticizing the "open" and "free" culture…
I am thrilled to announce that I will be one of the Synthetic Aesthetics residents this fall. Synthetic Aesthetics is a new program run through Stanford and the University of Edinburgh and funded by the National Science Foundation and the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council that…
Modern day biological engineering and artificial life research focuses on the microscopic, the molecular, the informational, the stuff of the scientific revolutions of the past one hundred years. Our current synthetic biologies aim to turn the living into the designed, the wet into the…
Today in my searches for the hot new trends in synthetic biology, I found a news article from Science Daily with an intriguing title: "Scientists Achieve First Rewire of Genetic Switches." Rewiring genetic switches sounds pretty neat, but this headline was intriguing to me first of all because it's…

Hey hey! Congrats on the new sexy-looking blog!

Congrats on moving to scienceblogs. Your a pro now.

Very exciting - congrats!

Wow, Lincoln-Sudbury grad on my favorite blog-space. I am so impressed!
Welcome!

By longsmith (not verified) on 12 Jan 2010 #permalink

congrats! :)

By Nicolas Keller (not verified) on 16 Jan 2010 #permalink