For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page and our Millions Against Monsanto page.

If you’re like me, the concept of synthetic biology-the application of engineering techniques to the building blocks of life-is pretty hard to get your head around. I get synthesizing, say, material to make clothes out of. But synthesizing new life forms? Apparently, while I stand slack-jawed, the novel technology is quickly going mainstream. Here’s the
New York Times:

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric street lamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

What could be more innocuous than plants that generate useful light? And moreover, the “glowing plants” project isn’t the work of a big, bad multinational like Monsanto or a corporate-funded academic lab, the
Times notes, but rather a “small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.”

And they’re not financing the project by tapping Wall Street or big banks, but rather the democratic cash-raising method of our age par excellence, the Kickstarter campaign. The project launched April 23 with a goal to raise $65,000; it has already exceeded $480,000 in pledges, aided by glowing-so to speak-reports in
Tech Crunch,
Fast Company, and
Forbes, as well as the promise that anyone who commits at least $40 will “receive seeds to grow a glowing plant at home.”

What could possibly go wrong? Well, I don’t know much about the science of creating living lamps. But I do think it’s important to think out the broader implications of synbio-and the novel technology is known-and ask questions about how its release from the lab into the world is regulated. Which is evidently pretty lightly-this consortium is casually promising to distribute glowing seeds to hundreds of people.

I can’t think of a better source for examining the promise and perils of synbio than than this much-cited 2007 essay by the eminent physicist-and climate change skeptic-Freeman Dyson. In it, he laid laid out a rosy vision for what he called the “domestication of biotechnology.” Here’s Dyson:

There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too. Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer.

And what about the obvious dangers-what if these God-like “housewives and children” (ugh) turned away from conjuring cuddly creatures and start creating ones designed to bare their fangs, monsters instead of pets? You don’t even need to presume malicious intent to find reason for concern: What if some novel beast designed for cuteness escapes, goes rogue, and turns out to have unintended malign powers? Then there are the obvious questions: What if these new life forms behave in ways we can’t predict-or mutate in ways we can’t predict-altering food chains or larger biosystems? Dyson acknowledged the “real and serious dangers” of synbio, and allowed that “rules and regulations will be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others.” But he waved off that task-not his problem. “I leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers,” he cheerfully declared.