Cellular and Molecular Biotechnology

Since recombinant DNA technology was pioneered in the 1970s, the molecular technology toolbox has been filled up with such a large variety of techniques that so-called “Synthetic Biology” is no longer a hollow phrase but has become reality, or at least almost so.These developments raise various issues, of course, in terms of potential benefits and risks. Experimentally modifying fundamental processes may give new insight into evolutionary pressures that produced biological systems as they are today, and may also lead to novel practical applications. Biological evolution does not tend to produce radically new designs because typically natural selection has only variants to act upon that greatly resemble their ancestors in most ways. Big evolutionary jumps are vanishingly rare because random modification of fundamental processes is extremely unlikely to result in something that is viable. However, intelligent engineering is a much more focused process, and therefore the creation of new viable life forms that use fundamentally different processes is no longer unthinkable. During the meeting various contributors addressed a whole suite of methods that modify organisms in many fundamental ways.