Abstract
Visions of a synthetic engineering-based approach to biology have been a prominent and recurring theme in the history of biology in the twentieth century. Several major moments in this earlier history of attempts to redesign life are discussed: the turn-of-the-century prominence of experimental evolution and the coining of “synthetic biology” in 1912; early synthetic approaches to experimentally investigating the historical origin of life on the early earth; the goal of developing a “technology of the living substance” and the creation of life in the test tube as the ultimate epistemic goal for an engineered biology; the creation of synthetic new species in the first explicitly labeled efforts at “genetic engineering” in the 1930s; and the re-emergence of “synthetic biology” during the rise to prominence of novel recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s. The use of synthesis as a both mode of inquiry and of construction is highlighted. Aspects of the more recent history (the last decade) of contemporary synthetic biology are also explored.
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Notes
- 1.
The title of this piece and the first sentence are taken from Gunther Stent’s landmark review (Stent 1968).
- 2.
“I didn’t realize I was associated directly with invention,” Szybalski said in an address delivered at the Synthetic Biology 4.0 conference in Hong Kong in October 2008. “I found out there was article in Wikipedia crediting me… I had to find it because I forgot about it.”
- 3.
It will also include what may seem to be false positives, like (Huxley 1942) and (Reinheimer 1931) which – without much more interpretive work being done – seem at first glance to have relatively little to do with most contemporary understandings of “synthetic biology.”
- 4.
“Scientists Assembled at Cold Spring Harbor: Formal Opening of the Carnegie Station for Experimental Biology,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 12, 1904.
- 5.
“Man as Creator, Wonders of New Station for Experimental Evolution,” Los Angeles Times, “Illustrated Weekly Magazine,” February 24, 1907, p. 11.
- 6.
Leduc’s name seems to have been unknown to all participants at the 1.0 and 2.0 conferences: “We didn’t even know our field had a history,” the organizers told me when I applied to present on the history of the field at 1.0. At the 3.0 conference I presented a poster highlighting Leduc’s role; he was also mentioned by another speaker, and Leduc has been routinely cited as a founding figure of the field since about that time. For further details on Leduc’s work and its reception, and references to contemporaries also attempting to mimic living forms in this period, see Keller’s “Synthetic Biology and the Origin of Living Form” in (Keller 2002).
- 7.
For more about Burke and further citations, please see (Campos 2006b), Chapter 2.
- 8.
For more on the connections between radium and life in this period, see (Campos 2006a) or (Campos 2006b) Chapter 1.
- 9.
Chicago Sunday Tribune, November 19, 1899.
- 10.
“Creation of Life,” Boston Herald, 26 November, 1899.
- 11.
D. S. Jordan, “A Consensus of Present-Day Knowledge as set forth by Leading Authorities in Non-Technical Language that All May Understand,” in Frances Mason, ed., Creation by Evolution, New York, The MacMillan Company, 1928, p. 3.
- 12.
For a brief philosophical overview of some of the conceptual linkages between artificial life of the late 1990s, and the efforts at amorphous computing in the nascent synthetic biology around 2000, see Keller 2002. Written just at the time of this transition, however, Keller’s account wavers between seeking to claim a distinction between the artificial objects of intervention for computer scientists and the “actual practices” of “biologists who still live in a world of conventional biological objects… [and whose] activity remains grounded in material reality, and in the particular material reality of organisms as we know them.” Keller also recognizes, however, that “mediums of construction can change, as they surely will. They might even come to so closely resemble the medium in which, and out of which, biological organisms grow that such a divide would no longer be discernable” (279, 288). The “hope” of Christopher Langton and others “to create artificial life, not just in cyberspace but in the real world” – in “some other (nonvirtual) medium” – might have now found its instantiation in the productive and provocative mix of metaphors and techniques in contemporary synthetic biology. After all, as Keller has noted, some of this early bridge work “draws its inspiration directly (and explicitly) from the early efforts” of various investigators in the realm of artificial life (285, 347, footnote 54).
- 13.
From its basic and central conceptual concern to address matters of intellectual property and innovation, secure funding, integrate technological advances, and discuss the impacts of economies of scale, much of contemporary synthetic biology has been theorized in interrelation with commercial and industrial concerns.
- 14.
Curiously, “intentional biology” has re-emerged as the term of choice in a report from the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, which says “[i]ntentional biology, and its two main subfields, biomimicry and synthetic biology, treat nature not as a source of raw materials, but as source and code.” See: “Intentional Biology: Nature as Source and Code.” http://www.iftf.org/system/files/deliverables/SR-1051_Intentional_Biology.pdf
- 15.
Endy, personal communication, BioBricks Foundation Workshop, UCSF, March 2008.
- 16.
But as Carlson recalled, “The phrase ‘Synthetic Biology’ certainly isn’t new, and was emerging from other sources at the same time (Steven Benner, in particular, if memory serves)” (Carlson 2006). By late 2008, others were also beginning to point more readily to putative parallels between the development of contemporary synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry in the nineteenth century.
- 17.
It bears emphasis that this is only one historical path to contemporary synthetic biology, the one that supplied the current name of the field and some of its initial conceptualizations. There are, of course, as many conceptual and practical roots to the field as there are practitioners.
- 18.
At 1.0, a researcher had wondered aloud to me during a coffee break whether “the activists” might not be “a few years behind the advances in the sciences.” Attempts at 1.0 to prepare for a possible public “misunderstanding” of the field and the backlash this might generate – a discussion conducted in a session on “risk management” – proved to be prescient.
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Campos, L. (2009). That Was the Synthetic Biology That Was. In: Schmidt, M., Kelle, A., Ganguli-Mitra, A., Vriend, H. (eds) Synthetic Biology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2678-1_2
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