Via The Seven Stones: the Royal Society seeks your views on the emerging area of synthetic biology. According to the society," this is your opportunity to shape the focus of the Royal Society’s policy future work in this important area. We welcome views from individuals or organisations by 27 August 2007."

Synthetic biology is an emerging area of research that can broadly be described as the design and construction of novel artificial biological pathways, organisms or devices, or the redesign of existing natural biological systems.

Biologists have traditionally sought to understand how life works. In contrast, synthetic biologists seek to design and build new biological systems. The application of engineering principles to the design and construction of complex biological systems is likely to provide a step change from the tweaking of existing genomes usually described as genetic engineering.

Here is the Royal Society’s “Call for views” document.

See the Nature newsblog for Oliver Morton’s reports from the second Synthetic Biology conference at the University of California, Berkely, 20-22 May 2007.