On the Assembly of Things

It strikes me that a good question to ask is: What exactly are the overlaps between these two fields? I’ve been poking around the various synth bio websites and publications looking for overlaps in the form of people and institutions, and not finding all that much. Turns out this blog already shows up third on a search for “synthetic biology and nanotechnology“–which suggests that there aren’t many other people thinking about the overlaps. From the perspective of nanotechnology, the turn to “bio-nano” in the last ten years has been a significant aspect of the field’s development, and at the coarse level of a description of either field as “engineering with living materials” they seem quite similar… but perhaps with very different origins? How can we start to map the divergences or convergences?

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