Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, citizens of the planet Earth, welcome to Club Cosmos!
Now that's what I call a crowd who's interested in science and interested in tonight's topic,
which is synthetic biology.
My name is Wilson, I'm the editor of Cosmos, and I will be your host tonight for another jelly wrestle of science.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, tonight's topic is synthetic biology.
What is it? What will it do for me and can I use it to lose weight without exercising?
These are the questions that have panel I'm hoping you're going to answer,
and we have a simple and distinguished panel of fabulous real-life scientists who will tell it like it is.
Let me introduce them.
To my right is Associate Professor of, to your left, Associate Professor Desmond Loom,
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Center for Computational Integrative Biology
at Rutgers University, New Jersey.
He was previously Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics
and Director of the Phenomics and Bioinformatics Research Center at the University of South Australia.
From 2006 to 2008, he was a computational biologist at the Broad Institute.
That's a joint, it's an institute, kind of trying to do some interesting stuff in science.
It's jointly established by MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and Harvard University.
And he was a research fellow in genetics at Harvard's medical school.
His research interests are, strangely enough, synthetic biology, but also systems biology,
biological signal processing and network science.
Please welcome Desmond Loom!
To my immediate left and your immediate right is Claudia Vickers.
Wow, Claudia it will be.
It's responsible for molecular biology and in the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology
at the University of Queensland's Australia Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.
Is there anything you're not taking there?
I mean, bioengineering and nanotechnology, you're covering it all.
She's a team leader for the Sucrose to Bioproducts and Industrial Isoprenoid Engineering programs.
You just made that up.
Seeking to develop E. coli strains for sugar-based industrial bioprocesses with the aim of developing it as a carbon
and energy source to replace vitro chemicals.
We need her and her name is Claudia.
Please welcome her.
And to my extreme left, and I don't mean that politically, is Bolinda Baird,
who is the Professor of Health and Medical Law at Sydney University.
She's also a fellow of the University of Sydney Senate.
She was a founding board member of the Australian Institute for Health, Law and Ethics.
And is deputy editor of the Journal of Law and Medicine and a member of the editorial board
of the International Journal of Law and Context.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Olivia Bennett.
Okay, I'm going to start where I began today with my extreme right, and I don't mean that again politically.
What is Synthetic Biology anyway, Desmond?
So that's not an entirely straight forward question to answer,
as with a lot of things in science.
Broadly, Synthetic Biology is about modifying living organisms
to enhance their natural capabilities in some substantial way.
So typically, we're talking about doing something with microorganisms,
and a lot of this is being driven by technology for DNA synthesis for making DNA molecules,
which is evolving at a very rapid pace.
So just some examples, there are groups that are working on organisms
for producing various chemical compounds in cheaper and better ways.
Biofuels is a large area, and there are also drugs and materials.
And then there are also applications in biomedicine and designing intelligent organisms
that can respond to the environmental cues and help fight pathogens or help fight cancer.
So there's a pretty broad gamut covering there.
Are you saying that this is a completely new way of doing biology,
or is it if you're going back to basics for using new tools?
Right, so we've got everything in science.
We're never ever doing anything completely new, as much as we'd like to claim that we are.
So a lot of this is being driven, as I said, by newer tools being available.
Genetic engineering's been around for a long time.
But some data biology, I think, is something which is quite different
from what you would consider normal genetic engineering,
because we can now do things that are substantially different than what was possible with normal genetic engineering.
Claudia, this also allows you to understand how living systems currently work, doesn't it?
Yeah, very much so.
So one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing is actually looking inside cells
and working out why and how they do the things that they do.
And then once you understand that, you can take that information
and you can use that to get the cell to do something that it wouldn't normally do.
For example, make an industrial chemical or clean up a toxic soil waste or something like that.
And it's actually quite a privilege and a really wonderful thing to be able to look inside cells,
look at their DNA and their biochemistry,
and use that information to change the way that a living organism behaves
so that it can help people and make our world a better place.
Are you just introducing plugins into the software of life, as it were,
or are you actually creating things in scratch?
Well, really, we're doing both.
So let's just take a step back and use the analogy of a computer system.
So if you think of a living cell like a computer,
so in a computer you have a motherboard and you have memory and mouse and a keyboard,
and all these little bits and pieces that provide functionalities for you
to be able to access to do the things that you want it to do.
So if you want to give a presentation or write a story or whatever with this computer,
you'll use the tool that's required to actually do that, so software and things like that.
With living cells, we think of them as the same way.
So we're really thinking of them as programmable machines
that we can take little bits and pieces from and perhaps redesign if they're already there,
or maybe do something completely different,
create something that doesn't exist in nature now and get that to do something.
And that's really important, for example,
if we want to get the cells to do something that it really doesn't want to do
or wouldn't do normally, and to override those control mechanisms inside the cell,
we can then create something new that it doesn't perhaps recognise
and it can't control itself in order to achieve the outcome that we're looking for.
But why don't you violate the warranty if you do that?
Our life doesn't come with a warranty, I don't know, because of the paradigm.
It's really, is it fair for me to say that it's really the reduction
in the cost of genome sequencing that has allowed this explosion
of what was allowed synthetic biology to actually become a real life thing?
Is that true?
I would say that it's a combination of the dramatic drop in costs of DNA sequencing technology
and DNA synthesis technology.
So DNA sequencing allows us to read natural DNA sequences to take what's out there
and very quickly find out what their DNA or their blueprint is.
And then DNA synthesis technology allows us to then ride our own.
So this rapid drop in costs is allowing us to understand living systems
at the genomic level much better than we're ever able to before.
And now we have the technology to be able to, you know,
to write large chunks of genome and put them in.
So it's not just a case of just the cost dropping dramatically,
because the cost has dropped.
It's a big war's law, hasn't it?
Yes, so the cost of sequencing DNA is dropping by 50% every two years.
That's faster than war's law that we use to look at how information technology is accelerating.
And that's a really incredible speed of technology.
So some people argue, though, that synthetic biology is really just the application
of synthetic chemistry to biology.
Am I being unfair?
I think it's, well, I would say it's a completely different thing.
So, you know, obviously, living life is all about chemistry at some level.
But when you're getting to the point where you are piecing these chemical components together
to make a self-replicating cell, that's, you know,
and now we have the capability to modify that and rewrite it and make it to things,
I would say that's very, very different.
I would actually disagree a little bit.
I would actually say that there are a lot of parallels,
particularly if you think of a living cell as a thing that we're engineering
and a living cell as a bag full of chemicals that we're actually manipulating.
That's not so different from doing a test tube.
It's a little bit more difficult and there's a few more things that we have to think about
when we're trying to control the reactions.
So, would you say that there's something completely different
would be what Craig Venter created?
Michael Plasmino, Cody's, JCV1, Synth 1.0.
Why do they come up with these names?
Call it Cynthia.
Cynthia is what everyone's calling it.
What is that thing?
So this is the first, if you will, completely organism with a synthesized genome,
chemically synthesized genome.
So what this guy, Craig Venter and his large institute did
was that they synthesized the DNA sequence for a living organism.
It's a known living organism, they made some modifications to it.
And it has a DNA sequence which is about a million DNA bases long.
So that's these individual letters of AC, GOT, about a million of those.
They're able to brighten that up into DNA molecule and then put that into a cell
that then took on that genome and used that to make a self-replicating cell.
There wasn't just a random sequence.
Actually, the creative sequence that would do something, put it in the cell,
and then it did stuff.
Right.
Well, they didn't really...
It's a little bit unfair to say that they created the sequence.
They took the sequence of an organism that's already out there.
So we don't know enough about biology of living cells
to be able to say these are all the components that would be required to make a genome
that would function.
So I guess you might actually say we're getting really good at reading and writing
the genetic code, but we're not 100% sure what we ought to be writing now
and we don't know enough to write the whole novel that would be the organism
that we actually want to create if we're really making it completely artificial live.
So we actually have to kind of take a template from something that already exists
and use that to sort of develop something that we can work with now.
But I think that's coming.
Which brings me to Belinda.
You've been looking at the legal and ethical questions around genetic diagnosis,
globalisation of commercial drivers of biomedicine.
Does this...we have questions that answer when it comes to synthetic biology?
Well, I think one of the key questions that we've got to ask ourselves is
what is it that's new about synthetic biology?
What is it that raises new legal and ethical questions for us?
And are we simply, in effect, going through the same sorts of debates
that we've been through with other technologies?
And if we are, is that going to provide us with a way of thinking through
the issues that synthetic biology will raise?
What do we need to start from scratch with those ethical and legal debates again?
Now, my personal view is that probably we've been through many of these sorts of debates before
with biotechnologies and nanotechnologies.
And we can learn a lot from those debates.
So what can we learn?
Well, kind of the questions keep arising.
You say that to an extent it's a similar sort of questions and a similar sort of debate.
What are the questions?
Well, I think from a...
If we think about the similarities that might arise in this area from a regulatory point of view,
we've already had to deal with the issue of trying to work out regulatory systems
for areas where the science changes very rapidly, where the science is very complex,
where it's difficult for the public to understand.
You need to translate science into lay terms so that it can be readily understood.
And so lawyers can understand it too.
Lawyers can understand it as well.
So we definitely need the help of the scientists here.
This is very much a voluntary disciplinary enterprise.
There are often complex ethical questions that get raised by science.
So if a new technology is seen as a threat to human dignity, for example,
we need to have some sense of what we might mean by that.
These are really complex questions that we all have to tackle.
So I think that there are a lot of similarities between the way that we talk about new technologies
in different contexts.
And we need to learn from those different ways.
It's not like you don't have synthetic organisms now.
It's true that there are things called knockout mice,
which apparently are not mice that box and knock each other out,
but apparently something completely different.
Can you tell us what they might be?
Yeah, so knockout mouse or a knockout of any organism,
there's an organism that's had a gene for a specific function
that we may or may not know what the function is, removed.
So we can then examine biologically what the effect of the removal of that gene is
on something called the phenotype,
which is basically how the organism looks after you take the gene away.
This is like pinotel on the donkey when you're blind, you kind of figure out what it's doing based on...
Same way as you know what the gene does, going by so.
So there already exist organisms that, to an extent,
if you argue that there's a divide between natural and synthetic,
there are already organisms that have elements of synthetic, isn't it?
For sure. I mean, we've been using genetically modified organisms
for industrial and food and many, many...
And beer, this is...
Since about 4000 BC.
Is that right, 4000 BC?
Well, synthetic biology is that old.
Don't tell me.
Genetic modification is certainly that old.
Perhaps it was a little less targeted than we do nowadays,
but certainly, I think, actually, a regional question,
people really think of truly synthetic organisms as something that's a step different
from simple genetic modification, like proving and adding a gene.
They're really thinking of synthetic organisms as something that's completely new.
So what Craig Venter has done, taking a genome and putting it into a cell
and kick-starting it and getting it to replicate and grow and divide,
some people consider that to be synthetic biology,
and there's other schools of thought that say,
well, that's the first step in the right direction,
but truly synthetic biology is when we can create a genome
that we actually isn't templated off another genome,
that is really a new organism,
and then actually get that to grow and divide.
But the reason people got excited about what he did is
there was no natural origin of those pieces that made up the puzzle.
He built every single one of those pieces.
It wasn't natural origin. There was.
So when I say templated, I mean that he used the code from an organism
that already existed, and he just cut some genes out
to try to shave it down to what's called a minimal genome,
which is the minimum number of genes required for an organism to survive.
And then he added in a couple of genes that were marked.
So when you see the picture of this thing, it's really quite pretty.
It's blue when you see it on a plate,
and that's because a gene was put in that makes a blue dye.
And that was how they could tell that the organism was actually the one
that they created and not the original templated organism
that they used to synthesize the genome.
So one of the really exciting things is that we can synthesize from a template
or we can actually now create the sequences ourselves
and synthesize completely what we say de novo or brand new.
So really new sequences.
Thanks for the translation.
So the excitement here is that we're actually talking about creating
little mini factories that are going to do work for us.
Is that right?
Well, the excitement was that even though we used the template,
the individual bits that make up the DNA were put together artificially.
And that hasn't happened before.
Well, putting together, taking an A and then a G and then a C and a T
and then getting a whole million of those together and then putting all of them together,
that's never happened before.
That's incredibly expensive and quite difficult.
And what you're alluding to is that that enables us then to be able to make
novel organisms that can do things like service factories for us.
And of course, in some way, that sounds like we're sort of using these organisms
to exploit them and the fairest means, but we've been doing this for a long time.
And obviously, we use yeast to make beer.
And they are factories for making alcohol for us.
They don't seem to mind that much.
Actually, they're really good at that.
It's a beneficial relationship, isn't it?
Both we know versus.
Mutual is a mutually beneficial relationship.
Okay, so does this mean that we're going to see factories or bacteria doing work for us?
Is this opening the...
The sort of thing science journalists like to say is,
this might be 10 years away, but this opens the door to...
What is it opening the door to?
Well, it's actually more exciting than that.
It's not 10 years away.
It's here now.
We're doing it now.
So we're making things like fuels.
Well, fuels are more difficult.
So we're not quite two industrial scales of that sort of thing yet.
But a lot of other things we're making, chemicals.
So there's a company called Gin and Cord that's making a compound called I-Supreme.
And that is a polymerised to make rubble so that when you're driving around in your cars,
you can actually be driving around in something that has been made from microbial cell right now.
So it's here now.
So it's just a case of what the technology is allowing us to do this faster or do it better,
or we finally cracked something?
Yeah, it's well that the technology is constantly evolving.
So we've been making organisms that could be classified as synthetic organisms for some time.
The kind of thing that Claude has been talking about.
DuPont has an organism that makes a compound called 1-3-protein diol,
which is used as a biopolymer.
And that's...
What's a biopolymer?
So they use it to make materials.
Again, instead of making rubbers out of petroleum, they're proposing to...
So like if you make polyester clothes, right?
The ester is the monomer and the polyester is the polymer.
It just means it's a number of monomers all joined together.
Okay.
So do you consider yourself more of a biologist or an engineer?
I'm an engineer.
Wow, right.
Even though you were looking at the website.
Yeah, I'm not a scientist.
So I mean, I think there's a clear distinction between a biologist who spends his or her time
trying to work out how biological systems work,
and people like me who are much more interested in taking things that people already know
and working out how to...
What do you see yourself in that divide?
So I'm trained as a scientist and I'm kind of masquerading as an engineer.
I'm really both, I guess you would say.
What did you call yourself all into then?
I'm just an academic lawyer.
That's the safe answer.
Okay, we're going to take a break now for about 15 minutes
and be at order food and visit the little boys and girls room to get yourself a drink.
And then we'll be back and we'll take questions from the floor.
So take a break.
Thank you very much.
