Synthetic Biology: Caught between Property Rights, the Public Domain, and the Commons

Abstract

Novel artificial genetic systems with twelve bases instead of four. Bacteria that can be programmed to take photographs or form visible patterns. Cells that can count the number of times they divide. A live polio virus “created from scratch using mail-order segments of DNA and a viral genome map that is freely available on the Internet”. These are some of the remarkable, and occasionally disturbing, fruits of “synthetic biology,” the attempt to construct life starting at the genetic level. In terms of their scale and ambition, these efforts go beyond traditional recombinant DNA technology. Rather than simply transferring a pre-existing gene from one species to another, synthetic biologists aim to make biology a true engineering discipline.