A forum on synthetic biology: meet the great challenges with new technology

Synthetic biology aims to redesign and reconstruct living systems for understanding life or for useful real-world applications. In the past two decades, scientists have been able to use engineered living systems to produce many kinds of products from bioplastics to drugs, to construct a minimal bacterium with a fully synthetic genome and to store huge amount of information within a cell. And in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, the synthetic biology community became one of the major forces to develop effective diagnostic approaches as well as the drugs and vaccines, to rapidly cope with this great challenge with the state-of-the-art technologies in their hands. In this panel discussion held on 3rd August 2020, eleven pioneering synthetic biologists from six countries across four continents gathered to discuss the development trend, challenges and biosafety issues concerning synthetic biology.George Church Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, USAPaul Freemont Professor of Structural Biology in the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College and a member of the Science Advisory Board of Tierra Biosciences, UKAkihiko Kondo Professor in School of Science, Technology and Innovation, and Department of Chemical Science and Engineering at Kobe University, JapanChristina Smolke Professor of Bioengineering and of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and CEO of Antheia Inc., USAXian-En Zhang Professor at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, ChinaChenli Liu (Chair) Professor and Director of Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, ChinaJim Collins Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, USAJay Keasling Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, USASang Yup Lee Dean of KAIST Institutes and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South KoreaClaudia Vickers Director of the Future Science Platform in Synthetic Biology at Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization (CSIRO), AustraliaGuoping Zhao Professor at the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China