Tag: synthetic biology
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What’s in a name? Man-made climate, biology and intelligence
On 22 September 2026, at the UN General Assembly, President Trump announced that the United States “totally rejects” any attempt to construct a global scheme to control artificial intelligence, and then did something that no linguist can ignore: he renamed it. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” he said. “It is…
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Synthetic biology in the era of AI: From dominating nature to collaborating with it
Today’s post is a guest post by Christian Gude. He has a PhD in synthetic biology from the University of Nottingham (where we met when I was still doing synbio and RRI at the SBRC) and is now working at Phenotypeca Ltd as IP Analyst in a multidisciplinary role between science and intellectual property. In…
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The language of life meets large language models
Between about 2014 and 2018 I was involved in the social and communications side of ‘synthetic biology’ as part of the Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SBRC) here at the University of Nottingham, which uses engineering biology approaches to understand and then modify industrially-relevant bacteria. I wrote my last blog post on synthetic biology in 2020.…
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Understanding metaphors in the life sciences – a book review
I recently wrote a review of a fascinating little book, Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences, by Andrew Reynolds. It appeared as part of the rather excellent series Understanding Life, published by Cambridge University Press and should be read in conjunction with another book in the series by Kostas Kampourakis entitled Understanding Genes, which came…
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Minimal genomes, maximal assumptions
This is another guest post by Massimiliano Simons who is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University. He is also a member of the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology (WGPT) at KU Leuven, Belgium. *** Ten years ago the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the birth of…
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Synthetic biology, engineering biology and responsible innovation
Between about 2014 and 2018 I have been involved in the social and communications side of ‘synthetic biology’. I was especially interested in synthetic biology with relation to ‘responsible innovation’ or ‘responsible research and innovation’ or RRI (here are some blog posts). Since then other issues have pre-occupied my mind and I lost a bit…
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Gene writing: Between art and nature
In the past, I have written a bit about genomics, synthetic biology and gene editing, from the perspective of language and culture. So, when Matthew Cobb alerted me to a new thing called ‘gene writing’ at the beginning of July, I pricked up my ears. I told myself that I should write a blog post…
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Gene drives and Trojan horses: A tale of two metaphor uses
I was reading a recent article on gene drive entitled “Engineering bugs, resurrecting species: The wild world of synthetic biology for conservation” and came across this sentence about a so-called ‘Medea drive’: “This genetic Trojan Horse could then be used to spread elements that confer susceptibility to certain environmental factors, such as triggering the death…
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Engineering biology? Sure! But which kind?
This is a guest post by Massimiliano Simons who is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University, Belgium. *** Biology is a mess, not only the natural processes out there but also the science in the lab. Every biological rule seems to have exceptions and all biological laboratories…
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Xenobots-Xenowhats? Living machines and zombie metaphors
The other day a colleague asked me what I was up to. I said, ‘I am starting to think about xenobots’. ‘Xeno-whats?’ he asked? I muttered something like ‘you know as in ‘xeno-transplantation’, when another colleague butted in and asked ‘like Xenogenesis?’. ‘Xeno-what?’ I asked. It turns out there is a sci-fi trilogy by Octavia E. Butler written in the…