02.15.10
Dept. of Magic and Fiction
It’s hard to outdo the New York Times when the newspaper reports on the field of synthetic biology.
What you always get is a radical departure from reality for the sake of hype and nonsense to delight the inner child. Or, on the other hand, something radically intelligence insulting.
It’s a nice gig, particularly when it’s done from within the pages of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
It’s hard to come up with a more ludicrous lede graf than this:
It all started with a brawny, tattooed building contractor with a passion for exotic animals. He was taking biology classes at City College of San Francisco, a two-year community college, and when students started meeting informally early last year to think up a project for a coming science competition, he told them that he thought it would be cool if they re-engineered cells from electric eels into a source of alternative energy. Eventually the students scaled down that idea into something more feasible, though you would be forgiven if it still sounded like science fiction to you: they would build an electrical battery powered by bacteria. This also entailed building the bacteria itself — redesigning a living organism, using the tools of a radical new realm of genetic engineering called synthetic biology.
“Synthetic biology is the coolest thing in the universe,??? babbles some community college biology professor to the NYT writer, Jon Mooalem.
It’s here.
Change the world, make bacteria that squirt gasoline and/or electricity,
transform the world from community college at 26 dollars a credit. You name it, we’ll do it.
“Moo,” said the synthetically engineered cow as it ate ground-up rubber tires and plastic from a landfill, converting them to USDA grade-A beef.
But the magazine won’t let up. Once the magic wand of literary license begins to wave, there’s no putting it down:
As commercial applications for this kind of science materialize and venture capitalists cut checks, the hope is that synthetic biologists can engineer new, living tools to address our most pressing problems. Already, for example, one of the field’s leading start-ups, a Bay Area company called LS9, has remade the inner workings of a sugar-eating bacterium so that its cells secrete a chemical compound that is almost identical to diesel fuel. The company calls it a “renewable petroleum.??? Another firm, Amyris Biotechnologies, has similarly tricked out yeast to produce an antimalarial drug. (LS9, backed by Chevron, aims to bring its product to market in the next couple of years. Amyris’s drug could be available by the end of this year, through a partnership with Sanofi-Aventis.) Stephen Davies, a synthetic biologist and venture capitalist who served as a judge at iGEM, compares the buzz around the field to the advent of steam power during the Victorian era. “Right now,??? he says, “synthetic biology feels like it might be able to power everything. People are trying things; kettles are exploding. Everyone’s attempting magic right and left.???
If you want to build a bookcase, you can find a nice tree, chop it down, mill it, sand the wood and hammer in some nails. “Or,??? says Drew Endy, an iGEM founder and one of synthetic biology’s foremost visionaries, “you could program the DNA in the tree so that it grows into a bookshelf.???
DD broke down the hype at The Register last year in a piece entitled Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
Let’s take the wayback machine and see how well the Times story fits the cliches and rubbish:
Having delved into Lexis, [I] can say with authority that a couple of hundred major stories have run on [synthetic biology] in the last two years. They fall into two categories: Rewritten press releases distributed by newspapers, made only for the purpose of announcing the synthetic biologist and how world-changing his research effort/company will be; and stories explaining how synthetic biologists will revitalise the world, but bad synbiologists will be making diseases, bioterrors and bio-errors, killing millions.
Margaret Atwood wrote a hack sci-fi novel, Oryx and Crake, on this in 2005. The most amusing part was the premise that only two jobs will exist in the future – a person could be a synthetic biologist, or an ad copywriter doing promotions for synthetic biology companies. This showed Atwood had an appreciation for the megalomania in press release news on the subject …
The more one reads the proclamations from synthetic biologists, the more one finds they seem to have in common with the claims delivered by civilian egotists at the Pentagon who went on about a revolution in military affairs before Iraq went bad.
Biology, in fact all science, is given new starch. And anything fantastic that can be imagined will happen. The obstinacy of nature, results dictated from Murphy’s Law in which experiments simply do not work – or actually do work, but just in ways that are no more or less productive than previously – is not in this story.
The script on synbio also demands the saluting of Amyris Biotechnologies, founded by Jay Keasling, as the firm which will cure malaria, according to the New York Times. The Times, by the way, appears to have had the greatest number of significant suck-up pieces on synbio published in newspaperland in 2007. If the number of times Amyris’s work on producing a new source of the anti-malarial, artemisinin, is the criteria by which such a thing is accomplished, malaria’s trouncing is in the bag; with the answer to global warming as the icing on the cake.
Since this is the active reality, one must expect bragging about the character of our future saviors.
“[There’s] a nobleness and commitment they bring to these problems that I find really inspiring,” said [prince of Silicon venture capital] John Doerr to the Times in June. Of course, he was bankrolling the same noblemen.
Summer was also for newspapermen to declare a consortium of universities working on biofuels – Stanford, UC Davis and UC Berkeley – to be the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, press which some scientists actually involved seemed to believe. (This Manhattan Project is in addition to the Manhattan Project the US military mounted to conquer IEDs. That went well.)
A lab director from Berkeley, Graham Fleming, told the Contra Costa Times the work was “probably the most important thing any of us will do in our scientific lives… We’re off on a great adventure”.
“Cellulosic ethanol is just the beginning, and not even an ideal one,” reported the journalist tasked with delivering the grand vision. The reader will have noticed that, historically, the work of many scientists being compared favorably to the Manhattan Project prior to actually achieving anything is a recent American invention, perhaps to sow confusion and head off disappointment if, and when, new Manhattan Projects flop.
“‘Grow a house’ is on the to-do list of the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group, presumably meaning that an acorn might be reprogrammed to generate walls, oak floors and a roof instead of the usual trunk and branches,” reported the New York Times in publishing another blowhard piece on synbio in July.
Ten years ago, people from MIT were dispensing this scented bathwater.
“[We may develop] a tree which has gasoline or kerosene as its sap… Maybe you’ll plant a house, let it grow, and then move into it,” wrote W Daniel Hillis, ex of the MIT Media Lab for the LA Times in 1997.
While at Lehigh University and working on a PhD in chemistry in the mid-Eighties, this writer was familiar with a faculty member, a molecular geneticist, studying Trichoderma reesei, a fungus which produced cellulases. Of course, the big-eyed idea then was also to define and apply the science enough so as to enable the maximum production of cellulase for use in production of biofuels.
The scientist built a career on it, but cellulosic ethanol still isn’t running the country. Although cellulase from T. reesei is used in the digestion of cellulose, it is not especially inexpensive or practical. In the past couple of years, an oil-rush-before-actual-oil industry has sprung up, one which promises cheap cellulases as well as many other things. Much of it is new snake oil for the investment rubes, lubricating jacked-up subsidies, grants, and hand-outs to the corn industry for benefits no one sees except as costlier food.
Without going into great detail on why the infinite bounty of nature’s enzymes has resisted easy lending to cheap-as-water industrial transformations, it may suffice to say that old-timey molecular geneticists and biochemists knew something of the limitations in engineering various microbial boxes. And they tended not to waste a lot of time explaining it to journalists who usually didn’t want to hear it, anyway.
It involves some complication to explain precisely why, for example, active proteins which work miraculously well for the microbial systems in which they evolve, tend to become increasingly unstable when removed, purified, and put in a different environment. Regardless of having genetic sequences for the production of cellulases in hand, lifetimes can be spent puzzling over and characterising the fine details of a protein’s chemistry and its interaction with the world at large.
You also can’t have a proper synthetic biology blowjob without including a storm cloud amid all the sunny skies. And Drew Endy, as genius and wizard, must make an appearance.
“The rise of synthetic biology only intensifies ethical and environmental concerns raised by earlier forms of genetic engineering, many of which remain unsettled,” reads the Times. “Given synthetic biology’s open-source ethic, critics cite the possibility of bioterror: the malicious use of DNA sequences posted on the Internet to engineer a new virus or more devastating biological weapons.”
For Oryx and Crake , Margaret Atwood’s bit of science-fiction on what synthetic biology would do to the world, almost everyone is killed off with a manmade plague put into pills for increasing sexual potency.
“So beware of how we are being sold this scientific revolution with pledges to help Africa’s poor and ease global warming,” wrote someone for the Brit newspaper The Guardian around the time I did Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
“How synbio could go wrong keeps even dedicated synthetic biologists awake at night,” it was said.
Since I purposely kept away from mentioning Drew Endy for the piece in el Reg, sort of like a tree growing into a roving bookshelf, he showed up for the comments section — a keen observer of the press on the subject.
“I was grateful to see your article’s attempt to bring some perspective to the current press-driven hype frothing around synthetic biology.” commented Endy. “It would be good to develop still more perspectives on how synthetic biology is (or is not) any different from the last 35 years of biotechnology and genetic engineering. There are some real changes underway, but most of them are at the level of underlying technologies used to design and build genetic systems, and not in the high profile applications that attract most of the attention. A good place to learn more is to study the student project presentations from the iGEM jamboree … ”
I bet.
Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist is here.