Can Synthetic Biology Be Harnessed for Sustainability?A View from Synthetic Biology:Interview with Kaustubh Bhalerao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

摘要

Interviewer (EP): Synthetic Biology is often depicted as part of a new technological revolu-tion. Can you give us some tools to understand the scope of this technological pace? How would you explain synthetic biology for the uniniti-ated? Kaustubh Bhalerao: To understand how Synthetic Biology contributes to the new tech-nological revolution, we should first place it in the context of the 'New Biology' approach ad-vanced by the National Academies of Sciences you have mentioned above. One of the highlights of the approach is that we have awoken to the incredible complexity of the natural world around us. Rather than the hitherto reductionist approach to understanding the natural world, we must now seek to exploit the complexity to solve the most pressing problems of today. Since global problems such as developing a resilience to climate change and feeding agrowing popula-tion do not fall neatly into specific disciplines, our proposed solutions must also integrate ideas and concepts from numerous disciplines spanning physical, natural and social sciences.