How do you think the presidential election will affect funding levels for synthetic biology, and science in general?
A.We’re standing at the beginning of a century where we as a civilization are prepared to become significantly better at engineering biology, and to think that this will not have profound impact and importance on our economic and national security would be a gross oversight. My hope would be that independent of any particular administration now and for the foreseeable future there will be ongoing and significant investment in the life sciences, in biotechnology and in other basic sciences. Q. How does the intellectual property and information-sharing framework affect synthetic biology’s progress? A. If you look at the history of biotechnology, I would describe the economic landscape as dominated by balkanized monopolies where you have individual organizations that have exclusive ownership of the uses of different genetic functions. They tend to be funded to develop applications based on only a small number of these different genetic functions. So you run into a funny situation. The act
