Synthetic Biology 3.0 started today in Zürich, Switzerland and runs until Tuesday. This is the first European site for a meeting looking to unite biology and engineering under the umbrella of a breakout new field (1.0 and 2.0 were at MIT and UC Berkeley, respectively).
I tend to think of synthetic biologists as something akin to computer hackers, because they are looking to understand living cells in a more thorough sense by precisely designing manipulations to natural biological systems. They’re trying to write code for new biological functions and in a sense are hacking the cell. But that’s probably an imprecise definition.