This week I am on the US East Coast for a GCAT synthetic biology workshop sponsored by NSF and HHMI.  The focus of the workshop is on using synthetic biology as a tool to teach undergraduate genetics research.  Naturally I was speculative about just how "new" synthetic biology is, etc. but I am already impressed by some of the things we went over at our first sessions last night: the Golden Gate plasmid assembly process for example.  Some of the focus of synthetic biology (which is argued to set it apart from genetic engineering in general) does not come naturally to many biologists but is said to be heavily influenced by engineering and computer science, such as standardization and modularity.  There is also a comfort with "black boxes."  You don't have to understand the (generally known) details about how something works to use it (indeed the focus is on using any tool available without a detailed explanation of the mechanism), which does not come easy for many geneticists.  However, they made some convincing arguments and examples of the utility of this approach.  Part of why I am here is to get ideas for undergraduate research and education but I can say I've already seen how this could be useful in plasmid design for some of our other projects.

Also, I am grateful to the conference organizers for breaking some rules to allow me to be here.  The workshop is designed to have teams, preferably a biologist and non-biologist, come from an institute to be trained and take back cross disciplinary ideas with them to their home institute.   I could not find anyone at UH to join my team before the application deadline; so I figured I had nothing to loose and sent in my application anyway with a brief explanation, and was accepted solo!