1. Obama and Synthetic biology

Congress, Obama Take Sudden Interest in Synthetic Biology Congress explicitly took up the subject of synthetic biology for the first time Thursday during a hastily convened hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Wired crowd has been talking about how to engineer biological machines for years, but Craig Venter’s announcement last week that he’s created a...

| Read more

2. EuroSYNBIO Projects

BBSRC, EPSRC fund �1.5M for synthetic biology projects under EuroSYNBIO Programme 19. May 2010 08:09 Four new projects, announced today, will develop biological methods that offer a new approach to antibiotic production, power generation for extremely small mechanical components, new classes of medicines and innovative techniques to study cell biology. Teams comprising...

| Read more

3. Bio-Fab Ready to Distribute Building Blocks of Synthetic Life

Bio-Fab Ready to Distribute Building Blocks of Synthetic Life May 2nd, 2010 by Christopher de la Torre The first biological design-build facility in the world announced that it will soon be able to synthesize chemicals, fuels and new drugs by manipulating the elements necessary to make microbes. Initiated by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the...

| Read more

4. National Academies SynBio grants

National Academies' Grants to Spur Synthetic Biology From GenomeWeb (http://www.genomeweb.com/national-academies-grants-spur-synthetic-biology) NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The National Academies' Keck Futures Initiative (NAFKI) has awarded a number of new grants to fund multidisciplinary research efforts aimed at promoting new uses for and advances in synthetic biology. ...

| Read more

5. Synbio in Society webcast

Synbio in Society: Toward New Forms of Collaboration? Webcast http://www.synbioproject.org/events/archive/collaboration/ Jane Calvert, Ph.D., Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh's ESRC Innogen Centre, Member of the Synthetic Aesthetics Project Mark Bedau, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Reed College, Editor-in-Chief of the MIT Press Journal, Artificial...

| Read more

6. White House Planning Policy Group

White House Planning Policy Group on Emerging Technologies Andrew Maynard Andrew Maynard 2020 Science Posted: Apr 12, 2010 at http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/maynard20100412/ According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the White House Office of Science and Technology...

| Read more

7. Designer life discussion

DESIGNER LIFE: SCOTLAND’S NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION? Professor Ben Davis, Professor Joyce Tait, Dr Jim Haseloff and Richard Holloway Featuring renowned chemist and synthetic biology expert Prof. Ben Davis (Oxford University) and Dr. Jim Haseloff, researcher and lecturer in synthetic biology (Cambridge University) with Prof. Joyce Tait, Innogen Centre (Edinburgh University)...

| Read more

8. Synthetic Biology and defense

Pentagon turns to 'softer' sciences US defence research to focus more on biology, cybersecurity and social sciences to help win conflicts. Sharon Weinberger Published online 14 April 2010 | Nature 464, 970 (2010) | doi:10.1038/464970a Zachary Lemnios is overseeing the research shake-up.M. A. BURGESS, US NAVY By highlighting the limits of traditional military technology, the...

| Read more

9. Science and Design

News from the Wellcome Trust blog by Mun-Keat Looi, 6 April 2010: see: http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/science-and-design/ Evidence Dolls by Dunne and Raby uses 100 plastic dolls to provoke discussion about the impact of genetic technology on young single women Tomorrow night Wellcome Collection’s Supper Club welcomes designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona...

| Read more

10. A Design for Life

A design for life Edd McCracken (Sunday Herald, Scotland) 11 Apr 2010 The story of Scotland’s next industrial revolution begins down a poisonous well in Bangladesh. It is a tale with microscopic origins but one which has the potential to alter the very fabric of the living world, and turn Scotland into a global engine room. In 2006 a team from the University of Edinburgh...

| Read more

11. A life of its own

Where will synthetic biology lead us? New Yorker article by Michael Specter If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us. The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a...

| Read more

12. Synthetic Aesthetics

Synthetic Aesthetics is a new program to bring synthetic biologists together with designers and artists. Apply now to get a grant that could help you become a better designer of living things. Sponsored by science agencies in the US and the UK, Synthetic Aesthetics will bring together six artists and six scientists for a month-long international program. Here's what the program website...

| Read more

13. Scotland Takes On Synthetic Biology Bottlenecks

In August 2009, Scottish Enterprise invested �2.4 million to develop a solution for DNA assembly by early 2011. Nicolas Peyret The emerging and promising field of synthetic biology has attracted the attention of world-leading scientists for years. Simply put, synthetic biology aims to create novel biological systems and modify existing ones for useful purposes. It pushes the...

| Read more

14. Synthetics Aesthetics call

Synthetic Aesthetics is a new project between Stanford and Edinburgh that brings together synthetic biology and design in the interest of encouraging new kinds of collaborations to emerge. For two weeks, through 12 funded residencies, 6 synthetic biologists will spend two weeks in artistic studios and design workspaces and 6 artists/designers will spend two weeks in synthetic biology...

| Read more

15. What's in a name?

Synthetic Biology: What's in a name? Nature Biotechnology 27, 1071 - 1073 (2009) Abstract Defining an emerging field can be challenging. Nature Biotechnology asked 20 experts for their views on the term 'synthetic biology'. Introduction Similar to other new and trendy fields, synthetic biology has been defined so loosely that it can seem like all things to all people....

| Read more

16. Synthetic Biology Industry Association

Industry Forms Association to Address Opportunities and Challenges of Synthetic Biology To address the emergence of the synthetic biology industry and to promote its potential, a group of individuals and companies announced the formation of the Synthetic Biology Industry Association (SynBIA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts last week. The goal of the association is to provide a forum for...

| Read more

17. President Obama Hopes to Jumpstart Science and Technology Education With New Initiative

President Obama Hopes to Jumpstart Science and Technology Education With New Initiative: " Through Educate to Innovate, the White House hopes to return American science and technology learning to prominence Elmo and Big Bird may represent old school learning compared to video games, but both Sesame Street and video game programmers have joined forces as part of a new White House initiative aimed...

| Read more

18. Quiet gene circuit is more fragile than its noisy peer.

Quiet gene circuit more fragile than its noisy peer. Cell. 2009 Oct 30;139(3):460-1. Bollenbach T, Kishony R. Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA. Why is a particular architecture for a pathway chosen over seemingly equivalent alternatives? Cağatay et al. (2009) use a synthetic biology approach to show...

| Read more

19. Hacking DNA

Hacking DNA Bioengineering technology is maturing, and so is its vocabulary From: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/hacking-dna Illustration: Harry Campbell BY PAUL MCFEDRIES // OCTOBER 2009 But the real challenge will start when we enter the synthetic biology phase of research....This would be a field with…hardly any limitations to...

| Read more

20. Wellcome Trust support for iGEM

UK entries to student synthetic biology competition offered Wellcome Trust support 1 October 2009 UK teams hoping to enter iGEM – the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition – could receive financial support to develop their projects under a new scheme announced today by the Wellcome Trust. An annual competition, iGEM encourages teams of undergraduate...

| Read more