The Synthetic Biology 3.0 meeting ended yesterday with a closing keynote lecture by Tom Knight. In his lecture, Tom Knight explained how engineering principles can or could be applied in synthetic biology to facilitate assembly of “new systems that never existed in nature in a productive and safe way”. Key notions are the principles of hierarchical abstraction, modularity, standardization and flexibility. Defining appropriate levels of abstraction in the description and design of biological objects is essential to cope with the otherwise daunting complexity, says Tom Knight. The power of these concepts was illustrated by showing the many levels of abstraction used in electronics and computer science: at the top of the hierarchy are concepts as used at the level of application software, operating system and programming languages while the lowest levels of abstraction go progressively down to the levels of processing unit, logic gates, semiconductor physics and ultimately quantum mechanics at the very bottom of the hiearchy.

Listening to the talks given at this conference, it seems that only a modest fraction of the presented research relied on engineering concepts as presented by Tom Knight. The synthetic approach applied to the understanding of fundamental aspects of living organisms is conceptually extremely powerful and from the scope of this meeting it is apparent that synthetic biology is not limited to its engineering side. But it is also clear that applying principles of engineering to biology needs very significant- in fact enormous – efforts and more time is probably needed for synthetic biological engineering to come of age. One of Tom Knight’s slides depicting a VLSI circuit made me wonder whether the type of work needed to found synthetic biology as a true engineering discipline- systematic standardization, defining the interfaces between abstraction levels, etc- is well rewarded within the academic and publishing context in which conventional biological research is conducted. How was the situation in the early days of electronics? What was the part of academic research and what was the influence of companies in pushing standardization? What are the lessons to be learned by synthetic biology on how to develop the appropriate strategies and infrastructure to promote the foundational work (Endy, 2005) required for rigorous engineering practice in synthetic biology?

It will be interesting to re-examine these questions next year, at the SB 4.0 meeting (apparently to be held somewhere in Asia), to see how the many facets of this field are evolving.