Last Retro Stanford

Day Nine Tuesday June 21 2011

I am back from California. There’s a lot to say about the last seven days. Where shall I start?

O.K. For me it was my first time out of Europe. In addition to that I have a positive balance on my bank account for the first time since 2005 and I put my finger into the Pacific Ocean also for the first time in my life: My personal Balboa experience.

After arriving back home I have also joined with Twitter and I plan to start a real blog, not a static, old fashioned storytelling prosaic sort of thing. This of course could include what I am writing now.

One of the main conclusions of my trip is that I really start to get into Lukacz's idea of “Desantropomorphization” of science. Social sciences and humanities are always criticized for being not enough formal and too subjective and too probabilistic. After three more days with the “upper-crust” of synthetic biology I can see where engineering and natural science has its anthropomorphic limitations too. At the SB5.0 I experienced a new scientific community’s attempt at communicating science. On the one hand there were many beautiful, inspiring, subtle and fascinating talks and posters. On the other hand I was reminded of one of my professors’ (Franz Wagner) quotes: “I think 5000 years ago we had two full suitcases of knowledge how to deal with the world, somehow we have lost all of this in the process of civilization and through science we have at least rediscovered about two used tissues from those suitcases.” Except very few talks that somehow showed a meta-perspective of what is going on in Synthetic Biology there was much detail (in itself often very clever and sophisticated work) but it all gave the impression of individual islands of knowledge that start to reach out for other shores but don’t have a clue where to head for or where the wind might be blowing.

Of course it is a real marvel to be able to write whole genomes, to master the alphabet of life in genomics and proteomics. But what shall we write? Machines, monsters and miracles are waiting to be designed. In fact no one really knows how yet. The words and sentences are still much too expensive to write new books of life. Craig Venters admirable achievements are copy and paste poetry that involves huge amounts of resources and manpower.

Maybe one of the problems, a problem of science in general is our anthropomorphic approaches and assumptions. “One gene, one PhD student” is one of the quotes that I still have in mind from one of the talks at the conference. It seems to be obvious for something as complicated (the word that was used at least once in every talk) as living systems it needs systems of knowledge to understand and rebuild them. Although SB in terms of community and institutionalization has grown substantially recently, it is still like a primordial soup of individual RNA’s and proteins that have come together in a SB labelled cell membrane for the first time, but who have no real idea of how to interact to form a functioning metabolism. There are some strands leading to that, like the ideas of engineering principles and standardization and also reproduction has been started with the help of iGem. Nevertheless it seems a long time to go until we put “the first mouse/marsupial hybrid on Mars”.