‘We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics’: re-factoring biology as a software engineering enterprise.
Adrian Mackenzie
Lancaster University, LA1 4YD, UK
The paper describes certain trends in the field of synthetic biology or ’synbio’ from the perspective of software engineering practices. The nascent field of synbio is relying heavily on software engineering approaches such as modularity, platforms, registries, libraries, standards and re-factoring to develop technologies such as biofuels, drugs, assays, biosensors and crops. The idea is that shared codifications of techniques and processes of biological engineering will lead to an accelerating rate of invention in biology. As well as invoking software engineering as a design philosophy to be ‘ported’ into biology, the everyday practices of synbio are saturated by web software cultures of collaboration and participation (wikis, blogs) as well as relying on web-based technical services (such as DNA synthesis, sequences database and searching tools). One analytical question for sociologies of synbio would be: does the model of software engineering and design abstraction begins to break down in synbio? Based on a small case study of two different synbio projects, this paper will sketch a preliminary answer to that question.
