Biosafety and Synbio

Is it safe ? Are they under human control ? Are the precautions more than sufficient to ensure best safety ? People are filled with so many similar questions when it comes to using the products of synbio. “An engineer’s approach to looking at a biological system is refreshing but it doesn’t make it more predictable. The engineers can come and rewire this and that. But biological systems are not simple…And the engineers will find out that the bacteria are just laughing at them.” – Eckard Wimmer, molecular geneticist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who synthesised poliovirus. Biological systems are extremely complicated and so far we have reached but still so less we have understood and yet the synbio practitioners don’t hesitate to quote that safety is assured assuming an impossible achievement of mastery over their art when it is wel known that living systems evolve and mutate. Only recently have scientists rejected conventional wisdom about genetic inheritance: no single gene exclusively governs the molecular processes that give rise to a particular inherited trait. They have also discovered that the vast “non-coding” sequences of DNA (so-called “junk” DNA), long considered irrelevant because they yield no proteins, may actually play indispensable roles in affecting an organism’s function, health and heredity. Under such circumstances there is high possibility that many of the scientific assumptions will be rejected and corrected with new ones which may change the whole scenario.