On the origin of systems. Systems biology, synthetic biology and the origin of life (original) (raw)
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Dreaming of a Universal Biology: Synthetic Biology and the Origins of Life
HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, 2021
Synthetic biology aims to synthesize novel biological systems or redesign existing ones. The field has raised numerous philosophical questions, but most especially what is novel to this field. In this article I argue for a novel take, since the dominant ways to understand synthetic biology's specificity each face problems. Inspired by the examination of the work of a number of chemists, I argue that synthetic biology differentiates itself by a new regime of articulation, i.e. a new way of articulating the questions and phenomena it wants to address. Instead of describing actual existing biological systems, the field aims to describe biological possibilities. In the second part I corroborate this hypothesis through a comparison between early research in the field of the origins of life and contemporary synthetic biologists, who are not so much interested in the historical origin of life on Earth, but rather in a universal biology of the possible origins of any life whatsoever.
(2009) Can synthetic biology shed light on the origin of life?
It is a most commonly accepted hypothesis that life originated from inanimate matter, somehow being a synthetic product of organic aggregates, and as such, a result of some sort of prebiotic synthetic biology. In the past decades, the newly formed scientific discipline of synthetic biology has set ambitious goals by pursuing the complete design and production of genetic circuits, entire genomes or even whole organisms. In this paper, I argue that synthetic biology might also shed some novel and interesting perspectives on the question of the origin of life, and that, in addition, it might challenge our most commonly accepted definitions of life, thereby changing the ways we might think about life and its origin.
Life by design: Philosophical perspectives on synthetic biology
BIO Web of Conferences, 2015
Biology is Technology", this title of a book authored by bioengineer Rob Carlson captures the essence of synthetic biology. This novel research field is in the hands of engineers, who are in charge of redesigning life or designing new forms of life for specific purposes. In the aftermath of "the century of the gene" (Evelyn Fox Keller, Cambridge Mass, Harvard University Press, 2002) he comes the century of "life by design". As the emergence of molecular biology allowed reading the code of life, it seems quite natural to rewrite it with the alphabet. "From reading to writing the genetic code", this is how Craig Venter, a genetic engineer who designed the first bacteria with a synthetic genome in 2010, explains and legitimizes his research programme. It seems to be a logical inference based on a chronological sequence. The prospect of designing organisms triggers the promise of manufacture of all sorts of organisms to meet societal demands or human desires and fantasies: From bacteria-workers to the creation of new forms of life or even.. . immortal life. Just as in nanotechnology, synthetic biology develops an "economy of promises". However synthetic biology seems to go one step further. While nanotechnology has been advertised with the slogan "shaping the world atom by atom" in the 2000 US National NanoInitiative, synthetic biology opens up the more challenging perspective of designing organisms that will remake the world for us. Re-engineered yeasts or bacteria will serve as pharmaceutical plants producing drugs. Synthetic algae will provide renewable fuel for our daily consumption of energy. Synthetic bacteria will decontaminate the soils polluted by chemicals and nuclear waste. This paper outlines a number of distinctive features of this emerging field in the constellation of bionanotechnologies. It then insists on the variety of research agendas and strategies gathered under the umbrella "synthetic biology". While redesigning life is the central goal, synthetic biologists do not develop a uniform view of living organisms.
Engineers of Life? A Critical Examination of the Concept of Life in the Debate on Synthetic Biology.
Ambivalences of Creating Life – Societal and Philosophical Dimensions of Synthetic Biology, edited by Margret Engelhard, Kristin Hagen and Georg Toepfer, Heidelberg (Springer) , 2016
The concept of life plays a crucial role in the debate on synthetic biology. The first part of this chapter outlines the controversial debate on the status of the concept of life in current science and philosophy. Against this background, synthetic biology and the discourse on its scientific and societal consequences is revealed as an exception. Here, the concept of life is not only used as buzzword but also discussed theoretically and links the ethical aspects with the epistemological prerequisites and the ontological consequences of synthetic biology. The second part of the chapter examines this point of intersection and analyses some of the issues which are discussed in terms of the concept of life. The third part turns to the history of the concept of life. It offers an examination of scientific and philosophical discourses on life at the turn of the 20th century and suggests a surprising result: In the light of this history, synthetic biology leads to well-known debates, arguments, notions and questions. But it is concluded that the concept of life is too ambiguous and controversial to be useful for capturing the actual practice of synthetic biology. In the fourth part I argue that with regard to the ethical evaluation of synthetic biology, the ambiguity of the concept of life is not as problematic as sometimes held because other challenges are more important. The question whether the activity of synthetic biological systems should be conceived as life or not is primarily theoretical.
Synthetic Biology - Rebooting Life
2014
"The alchemist’s rejected dream of creating a homunculus in a test tube has now been translated with the sober chemist’s dream of creating, not a little man, but at least a virus… perhaps eventually a bacterium. [...] What an audaciously stultifying proposal! One would hardly guess from this project that life already exists and has penetrated every nook and corner of this planet". These harsh words against the ambition of "creating life" were written by Lewis Mumford in 1970. Here, I use Mumford's arguments as starters to stir up debate on synthetic biology and discuss its ambitions.
Jump-starting life? Fundamental aspects of synthetic biology
The Journal of Cell Biology, 2015
What is life and how could it originate? This question lies at the core of understanding the cell as the smallest living unit. Although we are witnessing a golden era of the life sciences, we are ironically still far from giving a convincing answer to this question. In this short article, I argue why synthetic biology in conjunction with the quantitative sciences may provide us with new concepts and tools to address it.
Basic science through engineering? Synthetic modeling and the idea of biology-inspired engineering
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2013
Synthetic biology is often understood in terms of the pursuit for well-characterized biological parts to create synthetic wholes. Accordingly, it has typically been conceived of as an engineering dominated and application oriented field. We argue that the relationship of synthetic biology to engineering is far more nuanced than that and involves a sophisticated epistemic dimension, as shown by the recent practice of synthetic modeling. Synthetic models are engineered genetic networks that are implanted in a natural cell environment. Their construction is typically combined with experiments on model organisms as well as mathematical modeling and simulation. What is especially interesting about this combinational modeling practice is that, apart from greater integration between these different epistemic activities, it has also led to the questioning of some central assumptions and notions on which synthetic biology is based. As a result synthetic biology is in the process of becoming more "biology inspired."
Synthetic Biology as a Proof of Systems Biology
2009
Biologists have used a reductionist approach to investigate the essence of life. In the last years, scientific disciplines have merged with the aim of studying life on a global scale in terms of molecules and their interactions. Based on high-throughput measurements, Systems Biology adopts mathematical modeling and computational simulation to reconstruct natural biological systems. Synthetic Biology seeks to engineer artificial biological systems starting from standard molecular compounds coding in DNA. Can Systems and Synthetic Biology be combined with the idea of creating a new science-'SYS Biology' that will not demarcate natural and artificial realities? What will this approach bring to medicine?
Genes & Development, 2007
The design of artificial biological systems and the understanding of their natural counterparts are key objectives of the emerging discipline of synthetic biology. Toward both ends, research in synthetic biology has primarily focused on the construction of simple devices, such as transcription-based oscillators and switches. Construction of such devices should provide us with insight on the design of natural systems, indicating whether our understanding is complete or whether there are still gaps in our knowledge. Construction of simple biological systems may also lay the groundwork for the construction of more complex systems that have practical utility. To realize its full potential, biological systems design borrows from the allied fields of protein design and metabolic engineering. In this review, we describe the scientific accomplishments in this field, as well as its forays into biological part standardization and education of future biological designers.