Engineering novel life

Mol Syst Biol. 1: 2005.0020A Scientist discovers that which exists. An Engineer creates that which never was.Theodore von KarmanBiology will never be the same. The remarkable scientific success of biology in describing, explaining, and manipulating natural systems is so well recognized as to be a cliche–but the engineering application of that scientific knowledge is just beginning. In the same way that electrical engineering grew from physics to become a separate discipline in the early part of the last century, we see the growth of a new engineering discipline: one oriented to the intentional design, modeling, construction, debugging, and testing of artificial living systems. Currently published in Molecular Systems Biology , Chan et al (2005) describe the most compelling example of work in synthetic biology to date. …