We launched our Integrated Human Practices visual tool at the iGEM Giant Jamboree 2016. Read more here.

At ESOF2016, Synenergene organised a reflection session on synthetic biology in collaboration with SYNBIOCHEM Manchester, titled “Synthetic biology and the new bio-industrial revolution” ( 03/ ).replace( /^(0[1-9]|1[0-2])$/g, '$1/' // 11 > 11/ ).replace( /^1([3-9])$/g, '01/$1' // 13 > 01/3 //UPDATED by NAVNEET // ).replace( // /^(0?[1-9]|1[0-2])([0-9]{2})$/g, '$1/$2' // 141 > 01/41 ).replace( /^0\/|0+$/g, '0' // 0/ > 0 and 00 > 0 //UPDATED by NAVNEET ).replace( /[^\d|^\/]*/g, '' // To allow only digits and `/` //UPDATED by NAVNEET ).replace( /\/\//g, '/' // Prevent entering more than 1 `/` ); } ">

Around 50 people attended the panel session on ‘freedom and security in an age of synthetic biology: challenges, concerns, needs’, chaired by Christopher Coenen, during the conference “Synthetic Biology – Visions of the Future” at NEMO, Amsterdam

A recent publication in Science proposing a multi million dollar effort to start writing the human genome was questioned in several comments. Among the autors are synthetic biologist Jef Boeke at New York University, genome scientist George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, Andrew Hessel, a futurist at the commercial design studio Autodesk Research in San Rafael, California and quite a few other ‘members’ of the US synbio community.

Jef Boeke, George Church, Andrew Hessel, Nancy Kelley and colleagues have raised quite some alarm over their ambitious proposal for a multi-billion Human Genome Project – write.

In this perspective I aim to elicit several preliminary lessons learned on ‘How to do RRI?’ from practice, which Synenergene partners have shared during the general assembly of Synenergene in Bristol, October 2015.

The mutual learning activities between iGEM and SYNENERGENE were continued this year, as we again called the iGEM teams to reflect on the societal ramifications of their projects by creating two types of scenarios.

Within the SYNENERGENE project, a number of online tools and activities have been developed and are yet going to be developed besides the main web presence on synenergene.eu.

This year the Doomsday Clock was set at three minutes to midnight, two minutes closer to catastrophe than in 2014.

The year 2014 is almost over, we’d like to take a look back on synthetic biology and its role in society in the last 12 months.

An exciting workshop was held in Brussels on the 8-9th of April 2014. It was aimed at sharing knowledge and learning from each other on Synbio related topics.

Well, here we go. This is my first blog experience ever, and I am happy that it is about synthetic biology. After all, this in my view is the most exciting scientific/engineering endeavor that I have come across in the last 10 years.

"The alchemist’s rejected dream of creating a homunculus in a test tube has now been translated with the sober chemist’s dream of creating, not a little man, but at least a virus… perhaps eventually a bacterium. [...] What an audaciously stultifying proposal! One would hardly guess from this project that life already exists and has penetrated every nook and corner of this planet". These harsh words against the ambition of "creating life" were written by Lewis Mumford in 1970. Here, I use Mumford's arguments as starters to stir up debate on synthetic biology and discuss its ambitions.