Later that summer, I read Steven Levy’s “Hackers: The Heros of the Computer Revolution.”

Now I’ve started to see an analogy between the tools used by nascent biotech hackers today and the computer hackers of the late ’70s.

The upshot of improvements in diagnostic kit technology are more than just clinical: cheaper, faster, broader ways of interrogating the natural world will be a boon to everyone interested in understanding it. In particular, I believe the amateur / non-institutional biotechnology community requires easy, low-cost methods for asking questions and getting answers about biological systems, and my intuition tells me a lot of those methods will be based on diagnostic kit technology. To me, the impact of future diagnostic kit technology on amateur biotechnologists will be roughly analogous to the impact microcomputer kits had on the “amateur computer scientists” of the late 1970′s and early ’80s.

“‘Synthetic biology‘ was, until recently, a phrase found in literature at least decades old (Szybalski and Skalka 1978), first appearing nearly a century earlier (Keller 2002), but not used much in the last thirty years.”

Drew Endy tends to emphasize that Synthetic Biology is development and application of engineering principles to the genetic engineering technology stack: DNA sequencing, synthesis, PCR + part & measurement standardization, insulation, and abstraction hierarchies for biological systems [4].

Other people use synthetic biology to mean progress in building a completely synthetic cell.

Craig Venter sort of ignores the “hardcore” SB engineering dogma and just talks about “Synthetic Genomics” (also the name of his company) as the ability to synthesize a genome de novo.

Of this set, I’m most excited about the hardcore SB dogma, which to me is the most visionary and novel.

[1] http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2398717

[2] http://fora.tv/2008/11/17/Drew_Endy_and_Jim_Thomas_Debate_Synthetic_Biology#chapter_04