47. The design and engineering with living things.
48. “Magnetic Bacteria May Help Build Future BioComputers,” BBC News. Accessed May 2012. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17981157. “Swarm of Bacteria Builds Tiny Pyramid.” Accessed May 2012. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fCSOdQK5PIY.
49. Bruce E. Logan and John M. Regan, “ElectricityProducing Bacterial Communities in Microbial Fuel Cells”, Trends in Microbiology 40 (2006): 5181-5192.
50. Jim Sliwa, “Genomics throws species definition in question for microbes,” American Society for Microbiology. Accessed 4 October 2009. http://news.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-3/ Genomics-throws-species-definition-in-questionfor-microbes-2239-1/.
In a world of such incredible creativity on the many scales that nature offers, we need to rethink our approach to human development. Rather than seeking to dominate natural forces, we could regard them as co-authors of mutually beneficial environmental outcomes. Nature does not speak the same ‘language’ as mechanical systems. Natural systems are complex, with laws that are emergent. They require us to think in terms of context, rather than in terms of the production of objects. However, the new scientific practice of synthetic biology47 enables the development of ‘living’ materials, where life’s processes can be regarded as a technology. These ‘living technologies’ share ‘the same language’ of natural systems through the frameworks of complexity and the processes of emergence. Living technologies are capable of harnessing natural forces to address design and engineering challenges in new ways, even forging connections between ontologically different substrates such as computer hard drives grown from tiny magnets by bacteria48, or producing electricity in battery cells49. These technologies bring new challenges to the design and engineering portfolios, as they possess agency, need sustenance, have a will of their own and change with time. Living materials require us to examine our understanding of matter, technology, life and even our understanding of reality. The categories and distinctions that we have conventionally conferred on natural systems since the Enlightenment may need reconsideration. Perhaps it is necessary that in an age of scientific ‘omes’ —which refer to the capacities of chemical systems to act in the course of biological development, such as the genome (genes) and proteome (proteins)—there is a need to bring forth a mineral-ome, so that we can apprehend its agency. Maybe our tendency to define also has the capacity to drive further artificial divisions and inequalities between humans and the non-human world. For example, J.C. Venter’s synthetic organism ‘Synthia’, engineered from a fully-manufactured DNA sequence and rebooted in a ‘ghost’ yeast cell, has huge implications—not just for the practical aspects of biological design, but also in terms of how organisms are defined and ‘classified’. Until a decade ago, scientists categorized microorganisms almost exclusively by their physical characteristics: how they looked, what they ate, and the by-products they produced.50 Now, Venter’s work implies that perhaps a better method for classifying species may be through the genomic sequence rather than the phenotype, owing to the considerable amount of manipulation that can be achieved at the genetic level of an organism. Venter’s group is in the process of compiling a database of bacterial genetic codes that can freely mix and match sequences to