The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together.
I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I'd like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.
Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.
Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation.
Bio-Technology is expected to play a major role in improving productivity.
In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.
Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.
The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.
Bio-technology is the science of the future.
Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.
Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.
Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.
I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.
