In response to a question Chris asked earlier re: the convergences and divergences of synthetic biology and nanotechnology:
This is a question I’ve been puzzling over for a while. At first gloss, the most obvious overlap between the two fields is that they have generated a lot of hype in the last few years, and are extremely promissory in nature (think of the asymptotic prophesy of Moore’s law that proliferates–exponentially?–in both fields). And because both fields have gained momentum and press coverage primarily by generating a breathless imaginary of potential future technologies–robotic armor! organisms “made to order”!, discourse surrounding the fields has gravitated towards debates about risks, whether they be gray goo scenarios or synthetic organisms running amok. And the inevitable backlash from colleagues in less high-profile (read: sexy) fields, in this case materials science and bioengineering, is shared by nanotech and synthetic biology. This blog itself is symptomatic of the overlap (as well as, quite possibly, one of the fields’ only junctions) of synthetic biology and nanotechnology as much as it is a critical response to them.
So, the next question is what are the more concrete overlaps between the two fields–I’d be interested in hearing about any hybrid synbio-nanotech research being done, or people or institutions that are applying the methods of one field to the goals of another. So far I don’t know of any… And what is the disciplinary taxonomy of either field? SynBio is the syncretic offspring of synthetic chemistry, electrical engineering, and computer science. Someone working more closely on nanotech can map its origins better than I.
And a third convergence I would like to open up for discussion is that of scale–synthetic biology is about decoupling scales of manufacture, so that parts, devices, and systems can be seamlessly constructed while blackboxing previous levels of organization (ideally, one would not need to know what parts go into a device in order to plug it into a larger system), and DNA synthesis separates the process of DNA design from that of fabrication, which can be contracted out to synthesis companies. And scale is clearly integral to nanotech, which so far seems to primarily devote itself to building nanoversions of technical objects–nanocars and nanoguitars (it is interesting to note that one of the primary goals of synthetic biology is to build biological versions of archetypal machines (bacterial cameras and clocks, “computers” that operate in different species platforms using a standardized chassis, etc).
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sophia, thanks for the post, this is helpful. 1. hype, yes of course… and in addition, awarness of hype. Every “nanotechnologist” I know (and there are almost none who refer to themselves that way) is skeptical of the label to some extent, even as they participate in the generation of hype, and the disbursement of funds. Synthetic bio right now seems to be restricted to MIT and Berkeley, with a few outliers? Is this a fair characterization? Does that affect the state of hype right now? Nano, by contrast has had twenty or so years to take hold all over the place.
2. disciplinary origins: in nano, it’s just about everything at this point, with the strongest claimants being chemistry (especially synthetic, and chemical engineering), materials science (including things like surface physics/chemistry) and electrical engineering. I think the likely place where there will be the most concrete overlap is with the people who describe what they do as Bio-Nano or nano-bio. There are also a number of different just-so stories that are contested both by scientists within and increasingly by social-historical-philosophical observers from without; the first is the “theoretical engineering” of Drexler, which is where the focus on different definitions of engineering gets played out; another is the undead story of Richard Feynman’s patrimonial claim on having been the first to imagine nano (questioned and resisted by many, including a nice article by Chris Toumey), and they there is the “instruments” story: that nano was impossible before the invention of STM and AFM, which is what created the possibility for something more than (and less than) Drexler’s vision. Does synth bio have similar just-so stories? What are the equivalent maverick/Ur-Vater/instrumental enablement stories?
3. scale– here I think what you are pointing to is modularity, which is related to scale in the sense of how people imagine what they actually mean by “bottom-up” and “top-down” (and a careful reading of the bizarre range of uses of these terms would be interesting). In nano, “scale” is all about how “at the nanoscale, materials and machines and organisms behave differently” so that people talk about how all bets are off when it comes to creating new machines, since they behave so differently, and is often made analogous to a newtonian/quantum difference w/r/t engineering. Which is to say, Nano opens up the possibility for an entirely new theory of engineering, in which “first principles” are very different from those of say, mechanical engineering. I don’t know whether synthbio people speak about a similar radical difference, other than their insistence that it is just plain new to think of biological components this way…