Synthetic Biology and 3D Printing

Synthetic Biology and 3D Printing(medium.com)

7 points by zfrenchee 12 years ago | 3 comments

peter-fogg 12 years ago |

This is certainly an interesting thing to think about, but the article is not well written. The author makes a vast leap of logic from "We are researching organ printing, and we have 3D printers" to "We will soon be able to code DNA and print cells".

There's a few problems here. One is that "organ printing" in its current state is not at all the same as printing a cell. What would printing a cell even mean? We know how do things like create a cell's membrane and inject DNA into it, but as far as I'm aware nobody can print a ribosome (one of the pieces that converts DNA's "code" into proteins).

Secondly, it's important to know that DNA isn't even the assembly language of the cell, it's the ones and zeros. The idea of hand-coding DNA is simply absurd -- not because we can't synthesize the molecule, but because chromosomes are huge and we don't even fully understand what everything does yet. Imagine trying to read a program's binary, except some sections of the code are repeated, some are complete garbage, and some look a lot like garbage but are actually totally necessary. Now imagine writing that.

There's been some work done on genetic computation, using the the expression of fluorescent proteins as "output", but it's a long way from general computation. The idea of a "DNA compiler" isn't even possible yet -- noone has figured out how to represent XOR, which makes performing arbitrary computations tricky at best. And, as you might imagine, using cells as computers is slooooooow.

jamesjporter 12 years ago | |

Spot on. We are laughably far away from being able to do the kinds of things with living systems that the author suggests. An analogous claim would be that because the Wright Brothers just invented the airplane, we will soon have cheap faster than light interstellar travel. I don't mean to be overly negative, this stuff is exciting! But it is important to have perspective and keep in mind how far we have to go.

Micand 12 years ago |

I don't understand the crux of this fellow's argument. If we can engineer and then print a fully functional cell, one which perhaps performs a function radically different than found in any natural organism, then what we're doing is no longer synthetic biology -- it's nanotechnology. In this case, we're building nanomachines, not cells.

Synthetic biology's appeal is that it leverages nature to do all the heavy lifting -- we don't have to engineer functions from the ground up, but only find similar designs in nature and then tweak them for our purposes. Furthermore, in synbio, we don't actually have to build anything, but only design it. We let nature -- which can assemble cells extremely efficiently, through a process it has been refining for the last four billion years or so -- build our systems for us, once we've translated them into the language of genes. If we have the ability to build our own nanomachines from the ground up (understanding, of course, that the cell is simply a specialized nanomachine built by nature), there's no need to constrain ourselves to the limitations inherent to nature's design. At that point, there's no reason not to divorce ourselves from the "biology" part of "synthetic biology."