In a Washington Post article, Dominic Basulto reports on significant changes in synthetic biology, one of which is DARPA deciding to move forward in earnest into the field. “Engineering biology is emerging as a powerful technology with the potential for significant impact,” as the Defense agency asserts, in a statement marked by both potential and peril. One positive would be the work being applied to the manufacture of cities both on Earth and in space. On the other hand, the creation of synthetic life will pose ethical issues and risks, though it likewise could be a boon to medicine. In the long run, I feel it’s inevitable.

An excerpt:

After announcing the launch of its new Biological Technologies Office in April 2014, DARPA is finally moving off the sidelines and getting into the game. If DARPA brings the same innovation know-how to synthetic biology that it has brought to fields such as robotics, the Internet and autonomous vehicles, this could be big. At the Biology is Technology (BiT) event hosted by DARPA in San Francisco in mid-February, the agency sought to outline all the innovative ways that it hoped to use biology for defense technology, such as through its Living Foundries program.

At the BiT event, which included a keynote from Craig Venter and a fireside chat with George Church, DARPA Deputy Program Director Alicia Jackson laid out a compelling new vision for “Programming the Living World” that focused on biology as a radically new type of manufacturing platform. The goal, said Jackson, is to take everything researchers know from electronics, physics and engineering and migrate that over to the world of genomics and biology, making it possible to mass-produce engineered organisms. Jackson called synthetic biology a “new technology vector” that is more exciting and more scalable than anything that exists today.•