Saying “We now need to move beyond Lego™ metaphors and genetic toys to professional technologies,” the realization of a common repository for biogenetic components – the stuff of which genetic modifications and synthetic biology are made – is launched. The name given to the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology is BIOFAB, the combination of biology and fabrication (with connotations of the semiconductor chip ‘Fabs’ of the computer industry).

Extending the computer industry reference, BIOFAB will address a problem familiar to millions of software programmers – re-use. It’s a whole lot more efficient to make software out of components that can be written once and re-used many times. The efficiency of re-use could be even more dramatic for bioengineering, since the creation of its components – genetic control elements such as transcription factors and promoters – can take years and cost many millions. In essence, the underlying mission of BIOFAB is to provide a framework to develop, manufacture, and access standard biological parts (read: genetic components).

A key part of BIOFAB is access, which comes under the rubric of ‘open-source.’ That too is a term borrowed from the software industry, where it means code that is developed and voluntarily given (free) to the software community to further improve and expand. In the bioengineering context, it means that at least some of the biological components will be cataloged by BIOFAB and made available (free, or nearly so) to qualified laboratories and researchers.

The concept of standardized biological parts barely existed ten years ago (except in the mind of Tom Knight, a senior Artificial Intelligence guru at MIT). Today students, researchers, and laboratories around the world routinely use such parts.

With seed money from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bioengineers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University are ramping up efforts to characterize the thousands of control elements critical to the engineering of microbes so that eventually, researchers can mix and match these “DNA parts” in synthetic organisms to produce new drugs, fuels or chemicals.

“Synthetic biology has the potential to make the engineering of biology much easier and more affordable. Via the BIOFAB, we will help ensure that the public’s investments and interests in the next generation of biotechnology return the greatest benefits,” said founding BIOFAB director Drew Endy, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Bioengineering Department and president of the BioBricks Foundation.

[Source: University of California, Berkeley]

Paradigm shift: It’s easy to compare BIOFAB with some of the computer industry practices – open-source, reusability, component libraries – but BIOFAB is not just inanimate technology. At many points, bioengineering is about creating or modifying living things. Its domain of activity extends from bacteria all the way to us, human beings. While thousands of bioengineers dream of all the things they could make when the right parts are available, others, mostly in the general public, will instantly flash on Frankenstein. Perhaps this perception is no fairer than the public perception of HAL, the insane computer in Kubrick’s movie 2001. Nevertheless, the BIOFAB project is aware of its ethical and philosophical sensitivity. It plans to make ethical research a part of its ongoing activity. Since BIOFAB is a central repository for bioengineering knowledge, it will also be a lightning rod for criticism, especially if something goes badly wrong with a BIOFAB related project.