Edge has a very interesting and wide-ranging tour of synthetic/constructive biology by George Church. Here’s the intro:

The biggest questions I’m asking myself, at least in the laboratory, are: “What is it that makes us individuals?” That’s what we call the personal genome project. Its aim is holistic, in contrast to the usual single disease or tissue.

The second is: how do we engineer biology? which can be called our “constructive biology” or “biological design” efforts. The two might intersect quite nicely in the form of personalized medicine.

The first — what makes us who we are — could apply to all living things, but for now let’s say humans. It’s an analytic question: it can be addressed with genomic tools — technologies — which we develop.

The second question, the synthetic one, is how can we redesign living systems to achieve new goals. How can we evolve them in the laboratory, in subtle or in radical ways, to achieve biomedical, or agricultural, or other manufacturing goals. Those are the two big questions that we deal with.

The intersection is in personalized medicine, where you would ask, once you know who you are, what you would need to fix, or improve. In the world of engineering and commerce a few fields display exponential growth curves. Most fields of endeavor do not — e.g. ; steel and cotton have pretty bumpy but basically slow flat growth. But information technologies, computers, communication, DNA sequencing, synthesis — have exponential curves, with nearly yearly doubling.