Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
dent teams receive in the mail a collection of BioBricks, DnA segments
dried onto filter paper or to the bottom of plastic sample wells. The teams'
mission is to assemble the BioBricks in ingenious ways and get their ge-
netic constructs to work inside living cells. in the fall, the teams con-
verge at miT for the annual iGem Jamboree to show off their creations.
Judging occurs and winners are selected. in 2008, eighty-four teams from
twenty-one countries competed. The winning team from slovenia engi-
neered production of a vaccine against a bacterium that causes a common
stomach illness.
in addition to learning synbio techniques firsthand and competing on
a world stage with other young persons excited about synthetic biology,
contestants submit their new genetic constructs to the registry of stan-
dard Biological Parts. The 2008 teams submitted fifteen hundred new Bio-
Bricks, increasing the size of the registry by 75 percent.
Why do iGem organizers target undergraduate students rather than
advanced graduate students in molecular biology?
Scientist
magazine re-
cently reported that “the iGem competition is an unabashed recruitment
tool, a scheme for seeding synthetic biology with young, energetic talent”
(Katsnelson 2009, 44).
15
The iGem organizers reason that graduate pro-
grams, perhaps unintentionally, begin instilling notions of what is and is not
possible in their fields. synbio promoters realize that for synthetic biology
to accomplish spectacularly good things in the future, young synbiologists
with unfettered imaginations must be nurtured. Preventing foolishly dan-
gerous synthetic biology will require more than young, imaginative syn-
biologists though. it also requires wisdom coming at least in part from an
appreciation for the evolutionary antiquity and functional complexity of
the biosphere.
Some Early Products of Synthetic Biology
only since 2002 has synthetic biology been recognized as a distinct disci-
pline, but by 2007, over a dozen new patents were related to synbio. These
include methods for DnA synthesis and protein design, several artificial
BioBrick-like DnA components, a method for the complete chemical syn-
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