by DREW ENDY
Can the reengineering of biology be coupled to the spread of tools and knowledge sufficient to improve the health of people and the environment worldwide? We believe the answer is yes, albeit with much work to be accomplished both technically and culturally. Practically, a comprehensive overhaul of the process by which living systems are engineered is needed. Legal, political, and cultural innovations are also required to collectively insure that the resulting knowledge and tools are freely availably to those who would use them constructively.
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With these challenges in mind, synthetic biologists and colleagues from Harvard, MIT, and Stanford now lead the BioBricks Foundation, an independent non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the open development of synthetic biology through the promulgation of new technical standards and legal instruments. For example, among its projects, the BioBricks Foundation is now participating in the creation of a “BioFab,” a public-benefit factory dedicated to the professional production of sets of reliable, standardized biological parts that will collective constitute an free operating system for biotechnology. By focusing on application-agnostic tools, collections of standardized, interoperable biological parts can be developed that make all kinds of biological engineering easier. This would mean that all possible downstream uses become simpler as well, with a much greater potential for positive impact on understudied problems and underserved populations.
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