May 20-22, 2006 University of California, Berkeley

The conference will bring together a diverse group of participants from a variety of disciplines, including some of the world’s leaders in biological engineering, biochemistry, quantitative biology, biophysics, molecular and cellular biology, bioethics, policy and governance, and the biotech industry. A collaborative effort among Berkeley Lab, MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCSF, the conference will promote and guide the further, constructive development of the field.

What is SB?

Synthetic Biology is
A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and
B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

Oliver Morton is blogging from the conference

This post and those which follow should really be going up on the Nature Newsblog (part of my day-job duties as the chief news and features editor of that great journal), but due to a fairly predictable snafu which is mostly my fault I don't seem to be able to post there at the moment, so I'm putting it up here and will probably get it cross posted there in due course.

Interesting graf:

[Steve] Chu, in response [to critics], says the plant people might benefit from learning to think like physicists or science fiction authors, and I'm not one to play down the possibilities of learning from SF. What's more, the fact that the set of "things which are subtler than physicists think" is pretty much equal to the observable universe doesn't mean that physicists don't have wonderful insights to offer to everyone else, even if the tone in which those insights are offered can, occasionally, be a little hard to take. Anyway, even if the disambiguated stomata never come to pass, or don't deliver advantages, they still represent an idea about photosynthesis that I, as someone with a book on the subject inching towards publication, have never come across before, so lots of extra credit for freshness.

Update:

Rob Carlson is also blogging live. Energy from ag.

Steve Chu (Nobel Laureate in Physics and Director of LBL) led off the talks with proposals that "excess" crop land in US could be used to "grow energy", by producing appropriate plants and methods via synthetic biology. He mentioned that despite global population expansion by a factor of ~2.5 in the last 60 years, cultivated land has only increased by ~10-15% due to increases in productivity. But Chu made no mention of the problem that we have trashed lots of crop land in the last 50 years, and it isn't obvious that we could use large amounts of land to grow energy given the state of the soil. More importantly, he made no mention of where we would get all the water to grow those energy crops.

I am all for growing our energy sustainably, of course, but I don't think that terrestrial crops have a hope of being the right answer. Best meme from Chu's talk was starting off with the most efficient engine design, figuring out the best fuel for that engine, then designing an organism to produce that fuel. Cool.

Plants are very inefficient at converting sun energy to a stored form as carbs and such, perhaps 1% IIRC. That leaves a lot of headroom for better design that might greatly increase output without increasing area or other inputs such as water. Commercial PV cells are often 10% efficient, though all they make is electricity.

I wonder if Carlson's concerns might be missing the point a bit? They are a big issue with all current crops but Chu is imagining something new.