How Scientists Plan To Grow Cities Out Of Living Organisms
From Gizmodo, August 5:
Imagine a future where there is no need to cut down a tree and
reshape that raw material into a chair or table. Instead, we could grow
our furniture by custom-engineering moss or mushrooms. Perhaps glowing
bacteria will light our cities, and we’ll be able to bring back extinct
species, or wipe out Lyme disease — or maybe even terraform Mars.
Synthetic biology could help us accomplish all that.
The promise of synthetic biology: Paris-based startup Glowee
wants to tweak genes of common bacteria so that they are bioluminescent,
thereby creating a potential alternative light source for future
cities. (Image: Glowee)
That’s the message of the latest video in a new mini-documentary Web series called Explorations,
focusing on potentially transformative areas of scientific research:
Genomics, artificial intelligence, neurobiology, transportation, space
exploration and synthetic biology. It’s a passion project of
entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, founder of OS Fund and the payments
processing company Braintree.
There’s a good selection of featured voices in the video. You’ve got
pioneers like Harvard’s George Church and Drew Endy of Stanford
University mixed in with visionaries like Rehma Shetty of Ginkgo Bioworks
(which designs custom microbes, like yeast that smells like grapes, and
dreams of building furniture from genetically tailored fungi); the
folks at Paris-based startup Glowee (who think bioluminescence is the future of lighting); and artist/designer Daisy Ginsberg, who weaves synthetic biology into her creative projects to reimagine systems design.
“The most stunning and consequential development of our time is this:
We have built tools of creation that increasingly have the power to
literally code any kind of world we imagine,” Johnson wrote earlier this year
at the Daily Dot about his conception of the series. “Synthetic biology
allows us to program organisms to grow objects. Genomics is starting to
allow us to program our bodies. AI allows us to build new forms of
intelligence.” He hopes the series will inspire young people in
particular to build that visionary future world.
Not everyone is as big a fan as Johnson of synthetic biology and
these other cutting-edge fields. Progress brings both promise and
potential peril, after all. In 2012, more than 100 environmental groups issued a manifesto
calling for a global ban on the use of synthetic organisms commercially
until better regulations and safety measures are in place. And a new Pew Research Center poll released last week found that most Americans remain fearful of so-called “designer babies“, implanted brain chips and other biological enhancements....MORE
