

Synthetic Biology and 3D Printing - zfrenchee
https://medium.com/something-like-falling/67cb428888a8

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peter-fogg
This is certainly an interesting thing to think about, but the article is not
well written. The author makes a vast leap of logic from "We are researching
organ printing, and we have 3D printers" to "We will soon be able to code DNA
and print cells".

There's a few problems here. One is that "organ printing" in its current state
is not at all the same as printing a cell. What would printing a cell even
mean? We know how do things like create a cell's membrane and inject DNA into
it, but as far as I'm aware nobody can print a ribosome (one of the pieces
that converts DNA's "code" into proteins).

Secondly, it's important to know that DNA isn't even the assembly language of
the cell, it's the ones and zeros. The idea of hand-coding DNA is simply
absurd -- not because we can't synthesize the molecule, but because
chromosomes are _huge_ and we don't even fully understand what everything does
yet. Imagine trying to read a program's binary, except some sections of the
code are repeated, some are complete garbage, and some look a lot like garbage
but are actually totally necessary. Now imagine writing that.

There's been some work done on genetic computation, using the the expression
of fluorescent proteins as "output", but it's a long way from general
computation. The idea of a "DNA compiler" isn't even possible yet -- noone has
figured out how to represent XOR, which makes performing arbitrary
computations tricky at best. And, as you might imagine, using cells as
computers is slooooooow.

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jamesjporter
Spot on. We are laughably far away from being able to do the kinds of things
with living systems that the author suggests. An analogous claim would be that
because the Wright Brothers just invented the airplane, we will soon have
cheap faster than light interstellar travel. I don't mean to be overly
negative, this stuff is exciting! But it is important to have perspective and
keep in mind how far we have to go.

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Micand
I don't understand the crux of this fellow's argument. If we can engineer and
then print a fully functional cell, one which perhaps performs a function
radically different than found in any natural organism, then what we're doing
is no longer synthetic biology -- it's nanotechnology. In this case, we're
building nanomachines, not cells.

Synthetic biology's appeal is that it leverages nature to do all the heavy
lifting -- we don't have to engineer functions from the ground up, but only
find similar designs in nature and then tweak them for our purposes.
Furthermore, in synbio, we don't actually have to _build_ anything, but only
design it. We let nature -- which can assemble cells extremely efficiently,
through a process it has been refining for the last four billion years or so
-- build our systems for us, once we've translated them into the language of
genes. If we have the ability to build our own nanomachines from the ground up
(understanding, of course, that the cell is simply a specialized nanomachine
built by nature), there's no need to constrain ourselves to the limitations
inherent to nature's design. At that point, there's no reason not to divorce
ourselves from the "biology" part of "synthetic biology."

