Sydney Brenner doesn't like the term 'synthetic biology'. But it's not all bad news for the field. "My only hope is that the term will replace 'systems biology'," the Nobel laureate said as he stood in front of an audience of synthetic biologists gathered at what has become the field's biggest annual event, SB 4.0, this time held in Hong Kong.
In a flying visit, Brenner tweaked the noses of the scientists who were forging ahead in a new area that, to Brenner, was not all that new at all. "I call it molecular engineering. And I thought I invented this," he claimed. "But I looked it up and discovered it was actually invented by our old friend Drexler."
Brenner pointed to a 1981 paper written by Dr Nanotechnology, K Eric Drexler, that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under the title of "Protein design as a pathway to molecular manufacturing". Brenner added: "This says exactly what you want to do. It has been there all the time. So what is different about synthetic biology?"
Everyone associates Drexler with robots made out of nanotubes but, as Brenner reminded everyone, the nanotechnology man was an early devotee of getting proteins to be our industrial workhorses of the future. This focus on biology has its problems, said Brenner: "Mathematics is the art of the perfect; physics of the optimal; biology is the art of the satisfactory."
He continued: "There is one big difference between the things that biology makes and the things that we make. That is durability. The problem with biological systems is that they fall apart. Why? Because you can make them again. If an enzyme stops working, just make some more.
"There is no natural selection for durability."
This, argued Brenner, is where synthetic biology or molecular engineering can make its mark: modifying the way some organisms work to create durable structures in the way that life has not up to now.
But he had a warning for those in the "biofools" industry. Brenner rattled off several examples of projects that were forerunners of today's synthetic biology projects. One was to produce hydrogen using anaerobic microbes held in vast undersea tanks that had sunlight piped down to them using fibre-optic cables.
"We did some calculations of what you would get out of this. We found that we couldn't make enough energy to make the plastic we would need to construct it."
He concluded: "When you are thinking of biofuels, you better learn some economics very quickly."
