Past
Nature and life has been studied for a long time.
Understanding our place in the ecosystem and the other organisms inhabiting it among other things gave us an edge.
The knowledge of biology that mankind had for most of history has been generated through observation, trial and error. Archaic humans lacked the incredibly powerful scientific method but examining cause and effect relationships over generations has advanced entire civilisations unbelievably well at times. A good example of what this is crop rotation. The agricultural technique of planting different crops in cycles to improve/maintain the nutrient composition in the soil, which maintains crop yield over time. Depending on your sources these practices date back to prehistory.
However, the field of biology as a modern science didn’t sprout until the late 19th century.
There’s been significant improvements in accumulation of biological knowledge since then because it was introduced into the academic environment. There, the already established fields of research were quick to influence biologists. To give you an example, physicists have been very successful in constructing scientific models (ways to describe phenomena) from the conceptualization of fundamental units. These fundamental units take on different identities
depending on your century; the idea of atoms was regarded as a controversial theory until around 1910. The theory that describes a significant part of observed and predicted natural phenomena that has helped shape our understanding of nature was humbly named by physicists “The Standard Model” and is in large part a result of this conceptual framework.
This way of thinking about matter -in regards of fundamental units- has greatly influenced biology since it entered the academic sphere and has led to important and powerful discoveries (Kay, 1993).
This development, together with the cultural/political fluctuations of American society, led to the sponsorship by the Rockefeller Foundation of the genesis of a biological field that leaned on principles of other fields called “molecular biology” (Further reading: “The Science of Man-agenda”).
It was dedicated to the study of life on a molecular level, seeking to describe biological concepts such as behaviour, ecology -the study of relationships between organisms- and phenotypes -visible characteristics- using these fundamental unit concepts that came from other fields.
Once we started to research biology in this way, we found good reasons to believe that proteins were the fundamental units of life.
However, further research shifted the view towards the belief that DNA is the end-all-be-all unit of life. This kind of development bloomed from the interaction between the different models of thinking pertaining to the different fields.
This interactive way to do research is very exciting and allows scientists to find data that would otherwise be unobtainable.
Present
Essentially this is where the story of Synthetic Biology begins;
The process of finding novel methods for research became so important and useful that it essentially created a field and it’s been expanding ever since.
The classical rules of categorizing science doesn’t exactly apply here because synthetic biology is, as Drew Endy puts it: “A means to an end”.
It is a field dedicated to forwarding knowledge in the classical fields of biology, but also chemistry.
The principles of biology and chemistry, happily, are the biggest contributors to the medical field and because of that, we are that much more advanced in designing therapies or understanding the environmental effects on our health. An incredibly positive outcome is the advancement in disease prevention!
Synthetic biologists focus on learning about the design and modification of the fundamental units of life to advance our understanding of living systems, as well as using this knowledge to build useful things.
To provide an example;
In 2017 the FDA (federal drug and food administration in the US) approved, tried and tested therapy that exploits the mechanism of viral infections. It was used to deliver the necessary information to program specific cells in the body to express a genetic code to cure a form of hereditary blindness.
The gene is called RPE65 and encodes for a protein that is expressed in the retinal pigment epithelium. As the name indicates, this is somewhere you want all your proteins expressed but since some mutations lead nowhere good this poses a problem for anyone that has the mutation.
Luxturna, as the therapy is called, was developed as a result of extensive knowledge of cellular biology, virology, human physiology and more.
Future
This highlights a pervasive pattern in this field; finding new solutions to problems by utilizing existing mechanisms and modifying them as needed to create a desirable outcome. The important conversations about what outcomes are to be prioritised takes place in collective society and thusly sprout many possible avenues of exploration. That is why synthetic biology is such a rapidly growing field and is advancing forward and outward in very unpredictable ways.
Something that nobody understood in 1957 when the central dogma (read our blog post about it) was first conceived was that it would be used to manufacture medicine for people with diabetes.
Similarly we’re at a moment in history where incredible change is about to take place as a result of the advent of gene-editing technology.
The outcomes of this will be very difficult to predict. Depending on whom you ask, and when you ask, the answers will differ.
If you’d ask the early adopters of automobiles what the outcome of widely distributed automobile usage could look like you’d be in a similar situation.
Certainly, few would tell you that it would transform pretty much every natural habitat by fractionation, increase the greenhouse effect and threaten biodiversity.
This is an outcome that evolved so effectively that it almost seemed like it was the point of it to begin with!
We as a species will have to communicate openly about what our innovations are to be used for. We evidently have more power than we thought we did, so we should wield that power carefully.
References:
Braibant, Sylvie; Giacomelli, Giorgio; Spurio, Maurizio (2012) Particles and Fundamental Interactions: An introduction to particle physics.
https://books.google.se/books?id=e8YUUG2pGeIC&pg=PA384&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Deep Learning
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1923-
FDA; Luxturna
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/cellular-gene-therapy-products/luxturna
“Gene Therapy Approaches For The Treatment Of Retinal Disorders”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC514
Interview with Drew Endy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIuh7KDRzLk
Kay, E. L. (1993). The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of the New Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press Inc.
Mayr, E. (1982). Growth of Biological Thought, Diversity, evolution, and inheritance. The Harvard University Press, The Belknap Press.
RPE65 Function
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/RPE65
