TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 

Offer practical skills, train students to think beyond and encourage social responsibility
 

1. Paper degrees are getting increasingly redundant. Grades do not reflect hands-on skills in many cases. The key is to focus on practical skills that are usable in academia and industry. .
    

2. Students have a better innate ability to take risks than guides. The key is to motivate them to think beyond. Our lectures are based on research publications. The purpose is to generate good unanswered questions in the class. We are not used to predicting and designing the future. This needs to change.
    

3. Every innovation comes at some cost to the planet. We need all-inclusive and socially responsible innovations that improve quality of life, causing least damage to the environment and uses renewable natural resources.

BRIEF INTRO
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Though the term ‘synthetic biology’ was proposed much earlier (Hobom 1980), the modern Synthetic biology approach finds root in two landmark papers in 2000 (Gardner et al 2000, Elowitz & Leibler 2000) that led to the realization of using an engineering approach in biology.

This was followed by formal introduction of the field to the global community four years later (First synthetic biology meeting at MIT, 2004) to signal rational and ground-up construction of biomolecular parts, devices and networks. The intended meaning of “synthetic” is ‘non-native’ or novel, not "chemical”, as sometimes incorrectly understood. The focus is on building inventory of standard parts, devices and circuits, design biological factories and manufacture products.

Questions raised by non-initiates often comprise the following: How is Synthetic biology different from traditional biotechnology? What is the use of new terminology? Does remix of tools and concepts from different fields qualify for a new discipline? Is synthetic biology an approach or an entirely new field ?

In my view, synthetic biology should be considered as a new approach that uses concepts from engineering and methods from molecular biology. Furthermore, design and manufacture of organisms from parts inventory, is new to the biological community.

A genome-wide data sheet of every part, device and circuit does not exist. The rules of composing an organism are unknown. Synthesizing genome based on computer aided models turns standards genetic engineering into genome engineering.