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Open Source Synthetic Biology

Open Source Synthetic Biology

In a News&Views just published in Molecular Systems Biology, Joachim Henkel & Stephen Maurer expose their views on the economics of synthetic biology (Henkel and Maurer, 2007): Synthetic biology contains almost all of the same ingredients that make embedded Linux successful. First, synthetic biology’s parts approach emphasizes strong modularity. This allows the work of creating a parts library to be spread over many companies. It also makes it possible for companies to earn profits by patenting some parts while making others openly available. Second, we expect companies to have fairly idiosyncratic parts needs. This means that they cannot simply ‘free  … Read more