In her synthetic biology lab at Stanford, Christina Smolke designs circuits and switches using biological components, work that may lead to yeast that crank out medicines or ways to reprogram the immune system. Winner of the 2009 World Technology Award in biotechnology for doing work of “the greatest likely long-term significance” in her field, Smolke is also involved with several open-science initiatives designed to help scientists work together more effectively. She recently discussed her research and open-science efforts with Science News staff writer Rachel Ehrenberg.
Is your research about creating new things or mimicking what nature does?
We’re often trying to mimic something that can be found in nature, but we are trying to do it in a different context. Biology is very good at producing very complex molecules that have very interesting bioactive properties that we use as drugs to treat different types of disease. Many times the organisms that do these very interesting chemical processes are things like trees or corals that are not easy to grow, or take a longer time and more resources and energy to grow. So an alternative to trying to develop large-scale methods for growing the natural organism is to elucidate the chemistries that are encoded in these organisms and then harness them and put them into simpler organisms, like bacteria or yeast, that grow very quickly and that we have infrastructure in place to grow in very large volumes.
What are the risks? Could this work help terrorists make anthrax?
No, but I think it’s very important to acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns. But there are concerns with any technology, right? Technologies are important because they advance our existence, our quality of life, but they also can be misused. With synthetic biology in particular, the concerns are more … to make it easier and more scalable to build biological systems. And so if that goal is realized and people can start building new organisms from scratch, which is certainly not possible right now … it is important to think about and put appropriate regulations in place. There will always be people who are looking to misuse technology, and so I think what’s important as a global society is to really encourage the healthy and constructive development of communities around those technologies, the researchers that are developing those technologies and also the users of those technologies. And the more of that we have … then the fewer people you have working on the misuses. It’s important to note that the technologies themselves will be used to counter misuse as well. So with the anthrax example, you could use technology to develop very sensitive methods of detection.