186

13.2

­

­

2017

So much for future technologies and efforts in the field of synthetic biology.

Why should we develop synthetic biology so intensely? Well, for one thing, to achieve

technological progress. Nanotechnology, molecular biology and electronics are our future

technologies, and if we can make electronics much faster with optical methods, we should

strive for this. The steps towards this are already showing great progress, such as picoliter

computer PCR, which would make it possible to place a million or so different DNA mol­

ecules on a slide and thus greatly speed up vaccine production, for example. On the other

hand, such efforts have the general advantage of simultaneously merging information stor­

age, cellular programming, and also synthesis and microfabrication. Precisely this also

results in a very robust and very environmentally friendly way of producing, as bacteria

and blue-green algae have been demonstrating to us for billions of years. The introduction

of light-controlled protein switches, however, makes it possible to switch each molecule

on and off in a very targeted manner and thus also to achieve a previously unattained preci­

sion of synthesis and information processing. In particular, the construction principle pre­

vents the technology from taking on a life of its own, something that was not considered

in the 1980s and 1990s when nanotechnology was propagated with living bacteria. On the

other hand, our current technology is not very robustly designed, always has to contend

with raw material problems (today’s electronics, for example, have a shortage of rare

earths), produces dangerous waste (electronic waste) and is very susceptible to disrup­

tions, interruptions in world trade and, even more so, to catastrophes or armed conflicts.

Reason enough, therefore, to intensively pursue this molecular technology with the help of

bioinformatics, which has combined three particularly strong exponents of nanotechnol­

ogy here for illustration (own proposal: DNA, nanocellulose and light-controlled protein

domains; Dandekar 2013), but has also already achieved very considerable success with

other biomolecules.

13  Life Invents Ever New Levels of Language