The brave new world of synthetic biology: Major impacts, significant challenges

While the 20th century was in many ways the century of the industrialization of chemistry, the 21st century is promising a similar revolution in biology. The revolution’s foundation began with the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and expanded to core technologies that help to understand, analyze, and manipulate our genetic codes as well as the proteins and, ultimately, the cells and organs that underlay human biology and extend to the universe surrounding us. These findings have led to numerous groundbreaking discoveries and the expanding potential to understand, detect, and treat diseases. We are also increasingly seeing biological systems used outside of the life sciences in a wide range of fields.

In recent years, the discussion increasingly has centered on synthetic biology, or SynBio, a term coined in the 1980s when scientist Barbara Hobom used it to describe bacteria that had been genetically engineered using recombinant DNA technology. The term has evolved significantly since then to be used more broadly and sometimes controversially.

While SynBio has already increased our understanding of biological systems and led to the availability of new tools for their manipulation and diagnostics, more recent advances in computing power and development of tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are leading to a further rapid acceleration in innovation. The impacts have the potential to be disruptive across many industry sectors — not just healthcare and life sciences and food and agriculture, but also industrial, chemicals, manufacturing, consumer goods, energy, and IT.