Synthetic biology currently sits at a point where computing was in the 1960s with increasingly affordable gene synthesis and sequencing, standardisation initiatives underway and a critical mass of well characterised genetic parts available in repositories around the world.
The field is poised to have an impact on almost every industry on earth. In the coming years, we'll be able to reliably build all manner of biological machines not found in nature for
production of fuel and drugs from waste, sunlight and CO2, to biosensors monitoring and responding to the progress of disease in the body, to photographic bacteria. These things are already starting to happen in academic labs but in the not too distant future the general public will also likely be able to do all of this at home thanks to standardization and abstraction making it possible to design a genetically engineered machine in the same way as we might design a website using reliable bioCAD design software, catalogues of well characterised parts and cheap DNA synthesis.
This will create an exciting synthetic biology future with unknown possibilities and now is the perfect time to get involved and be part of creating that future.
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