8/20/2005

Scientists, engineers, bioethicists gather for QB3 synthetic biology symposium

By Ken Koziol, QB3

More than 250 people assembled August 19-20 at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus to explore current research and issues in the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Organized by QB3 affiliates Chris Voigt of UC San Francisco and Jay Keasling of UC Berkeley, the QB3 Life Engineering Symposium featured presentations by leading researchers on the synthetic design and construction of biological systems. A grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative made the event possible.

Symposium topics included the use of DNA as a programmable substrate, the design of synthetic bacteria to produce malaria drugs and fight cancer, programming of stem cells, and engineering signaling proteins to control cell morphology. In addition, computer scientists and electrical engineers shared research on biologically-based robotics systems.

“We are fundamentally interested in being able to engineer cellular behavior, so we want to be able to program cells,” said pharmaceutical chemist Chris Voigt in welcoming attendees to the event.

Keynote speaker Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, next jump-started the symposium by showing scenes from the 1960s science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage, then posing the provocative question: “Why inject life with computers? Because science can only shrink computers, not people. So we propose to replace the fiction of an injectable doctor with the vision of an injectable medical computer, a computer that roams our body, armed with drugs, with a mission to search for and cure disease.”

Later bioengineer Adam Arkin stated a central tenet of his research, “I don’t propose to create life from scratch obviously, but I certainly would like to be able to forward-engineer behaviors into cells so that I can better understand how my designs succeed or fail.” Arkin and UC Berkeley chemical engineer David Schaffer are working to quantitatively dissect and control the expression of viruses such as HIV-1. After describing how fundamental noise in the system is exploited by the virus and may lead to viral latency, Arkin suggested that this knowledge might be exploited to engineer antiviral therapies.

The conference highlighted the vast possibilities for research and the numerous potential medical benefits. One of the speakers, Jay Keasling, a bioengineer and chemical engineer, presented his research on the synthesis of the antimalarial drug artemisinin, one of the terpenoid family of chemical compounds. When asked about the potential scope of his work, he responded, “It’s a big world out there, and I think there are a lot of interesting metabolic pathways. Certainly 50,000 pathways in terpene leaves us a lot of room to work. But there are also a lot of other interesting drugs out there, so I wouldn’t say that this is the last pathway we engineer.”

In addition to presenting scientific research, speakers discussed future applications of synthetic biology as well as legal and ethical issues stirred up by development in the field.

Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical ethics and humanities, and of religion, at Northwestern University, and past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, added a cautionary note to discussions on developments in the field, “Synthetic biology faces a serious realpolitik issue in the post-9/11 climate. It is naïve to think it is merely like all dual-use issues. There is a need to balance serious duties and serious rights.”

One of the symposium’s primary goals was to expose researchers from various disciplines to knowledge from other fields and to the collaborative work that’s possible within QB3’s multidisciplinary framework.

Evaluating the symposium, David Schaffer observed, “I think it was a success in that it brought together a unique group of scientists with common interests but a broad range of backgrounds, ranging from basic science through biotechnology and biomedical engineering. … Terrific work, for example, by Wendell Lim and Tanja Kortemme [of UCSF] gave me some ideas on how to engineer novel protein functions for biomedical applications involving controlling cell phenotype.”

“I was most impressed,” summarized QB3 executive director Regis Kelly, “that speakers who could not initially understand why they were included in the program left appreciating that engineering life forms is like engineering a computer, namely it will require the correct assembly of individual modules, each one developed by a group of scientists with different specializations. I was also delighted with the willingness, indeed the eagerness, of the scientists to come to grips with potential ethical issues from the very beginning. Finally, I am left with an even stronger conviction that synthetic biology is going to be a major pillar of QB3, crucial in our efforts to achieve international recognition.”

Researchers who participated in the symposium came from universities and institutes from around the United States and other parts of the world, including the UC campuses, Brandeis University, California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Molecular Sciences Institute, Northwestern University, Penn State University, Stanford University, Tokyo University, University of Oxford, University of Texas, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Yale University.

The symposium was sponsored by the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Department of Synthetic Biology, the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, and the University of Oxford.

View photos from the August 19-20, 2005 QB3 Life Engineering Symposium

University of Oxford

LBNL Department of Synthetic Biology