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The Conception of Life in Synthetic Biology

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Abstract

The phrase ‘synthetic biology’ is used to describe a set of different scientific and technological disciplines, which share the objective to design and produce new life forms. This essay addresses the following questions: What conception of life stands behind this ambitious objective? In what relation does this conception of life stand to that of traditional biology and biotechnology? And, could such a conception of life raise ethical concerns? Three different observations that provide useful indications for the conception of life in synthetic biology will be discussed in detail: 1. Synthetic biologists focus on different features of living organisms in order to design new life forms, 2. Synthetic biologists want to contribute to the understanding of life, and 3. Synthetic biologists want to modify life through a rational design, which implies the notions of utilising, minimising/optimising, varying and overcoming life. These observations indicate a tight connection between science and technology, a focus on selected aspects of life, a production-oriented approach to life, and a design-oriented understanding of life. It will be argued that through this conception of life synthetic biologists present life in a different light. This conception of life will be illustrated by the metaphor of a toolbox. According to the notion of life as a toolbox, the different features of living organisms are perceived as various rationally designed instruments that can be used for the production of the living organism itself or secondary products made by the organism. According to certain ethical positions this conception of life might raise ethical concerns related to the status of the organism, the motives of the scientists and the role of technology in our society.

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Notes

  1. In biology “markers” indicate certain biological objects or properties. Genetic markers are for instance used to follow chromosomes or traits over generations.

  2. Some comments on features 2 and 7 on my list: Feature 2: The term “autopoiesis” has been introduced by the Chilean Biologists H. Maturana and F. Varela as the only necessary and sufficient feature to describe and explain life (Maturana and Varela 1980). I apply the term here not to refer to the complete theory of autopoiesis but to summarize the features of self-maintenance, self-production and an external boundary, which in different wordings occur on most of the quoted lists.

    Feature 7: Of the four lists quoted here, “active response to the environment” only appears on E. Mayr’s list as “capacity for response to stimuli from the environment”. However, this feature is also extensively discussed by biologists for instance in context of biosemiotics (Kull et al. 2009) or modern interpretations of the autopoiesis theory (Bitbol and Luisi 2004).

  3. In contrast to the discipline ALife (artificial life), which develops computer programs that reproduce and evolve themselves, the idea with the computer simulations in in silico synthetic biology is that they represent processes, which could be integrated into material living organisms.

  4. Rational design in the unnatural molecular biology approach could for instance be applied for the development of alternative genetic codes, to design HNA or GNA nucleotides (Schmidt 2010) or alternative nucleobases (Benner and Sismour 2005).

  5. Some synthetic biologists increasingly apply directed evolution as a non-rational designing aid (Dougherty and Arnold 2009). This constitutes an interesting withdrawal from the machine-analogy. One could argue that the application of directed evolution that might indicate that in the end, the rational design of a living organism might be beyond human capacities.

  6. As described above, “growth” is a direct consequence of feature 1. constant transformation. “Reproduction” has been mentioned as part of feature 6. evolution related to the capacity of living organisms to form lineages that can evolve.

  7. “Natural” is understood here as “not intended by a human design”.

  8. In this context, synthetic biologists use the term “orthogonality”: orthogonal systems are characterised by their ability to process information independently from natural systems, without crosstalk between the natural and the synthetic systems. At the moment, such orthogonal systems are introduced into organisms that still rely on the natural coding system (Neumann et al. 2010). However, one could imagine that eventually living organisms may be produced, which are based exclusively on the alternative information system.

  9. “Overcoming” is understood here in the sense of overcoming obstacles, problems or limits.

  10. According to certain definitions of machines living organisms would not be part of this group at all, see for instance Oxford English Dictionary Definition II, Machine: “A material structure designed for a specific purpose, and related uses.”.

  11. Except of those bioegineers who explicitly want to overcome evolution and those who apply directed evolution as a designing aid, most synthetic biologists just accept evolution as an aspect of their products, which seems not to be of too much interest.

  12. See foonote 6.

  13. See footnote 5 .

  14. A related dual role of life as producer and as product has been highlighted by the autopoiesis theory but without reference to human involvement or purposes.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra and Lothar Deplazes for helpful comments on this article. Moreover, I thank the members of the workshop “The Definition of Life in Times of its Technical Producibility: Ethical, Legal and Social Challenges of Synthetic Biology” that has been organised by Peter Dabrock and collaborators, for their suggestions, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. This work was supported by the URPP (University Research Priority Programme) Ethics of the University of Zurich and by a grant from the European Commission’s 7th framework programme in the category “Science in Society” for the project “SYBHEL: Synthetic Biology for Human Health: Ethical and Legal Issues”.

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  1. University of Zurich, IBME (Institute of Biomedical Ethics), Pestalozzistr. 24, 8032, Zurich, Switzerland

    Anna Deplazes-Zemp

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Deplazes-Zemp, A. The Conception of Life in Synthetic Biology. Sci Eng Ethics 18, 757–774 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9269-z

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