Lesson 10 — What If...?
What Is Synthetic Biology?
Learning Material
1 pagesLesson 10 — What If...?
Understanding the Complex: What Is Synthetic Biology?
Thought experiments are not predictions. But they are useful tools for understanding a technology's implications — where it might lead if specific assumptions hold, and what questions that raises.
Here are three, grounded in current capabilities and trajectories.
What if all plastic production could switch to biological routes?
The case for it: most plastics are petrochemical — made from fossil fuel derivatives, using energy-intensive processes, producing persistent waste that accumulates in ecosystems. Biological production — fermentation using engineered microorganisms, running on sugar or agricultural waste — could, in principle, replace many of these processes with routes that are renewable, lower-carbon, and potentially biodegradable.
Some of this is already happening. PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) bioplastics are produced by bacteria and are genuinely biodegradable. Polylactic acid (PLA) is made from fermented corn sugar. Nylon-equivalent compounds have been produced in yeast. The question is whether these routes can compete with petrochemical production on cost and scale.
The honest answer is: not yet, for most applications. The bioeconomy faces a cost competitiveness problem. Petroleum is still cheap enough that biological routes struggle to compete without policy support. But the cost trajectory for biological production is downward — each year, better strains, better fermentation processes, and cheaper DNA synthesis reduce costs.
If you assume continued cost reductions at something like the historical rate for biotech production, a significant fraction of plastic production could be biologically competitive within two to three decades. What that world looks like: lower-carbon materials production, potentially less persistent plastic waste, but also significant disruption to existing petrochemical industries — which are among the largest in the world and employ millions of people. The transition would not be painless.
What if engineered organisms escaped from a lab into nature?
This is not a hypothetical without precedent. Genetically engineered organisms have escaped from research or agricultural settings before — GM crops spreading to wild relatives is the clearest example. The question is what the consequences would be.
It depends enormously on the organism and the engineered trait. A bacterium engineered to produce a pharmaceutical and lacking any survival advantage in the wild would likely be outcompeted quickly and disappear — most laboratory organisms are poorly adapted to natural environments. An organism engineered with a trait that increases its fitness — say, a bacterium that can digest a resource that others can't — could spread, potentially displacing other organisms.
The concern that gets most attention is gene drives in insects: an engineered genetic element designed to spread through a wild population, potentially altering or suppressing that population. If a gene drive escaped before it was ready — before adequate ecological assessment had been done — the consequences could be difficult or impossible to reverse.
This is why the current scientific consensus in the gene drive community strongly emphasizes staged, geographically confined testing before any consideration of open-release. Governance matters here: not because the technology is inherently dangerous, but because some failure modes are irreversible.
What if synthetic biology became genuinely democratized — DIY biology at scale?
The cost of biological tools has fallen dramatically. PCR machines, gene sequencers, and cell culture equipment once available only in well-funded institutional labs can now be purchased by hobbyists. Community labs — shared DIY biology spaces — exist in many cities. The iGEM competition draws undergraduate and even high school teams from around the world.
There is real creative and social value in this democratization. Citizen scientists monitoring local water quality with biosensors. Amateur breeders developing disease-resistant strains. Small-scale innovators who couldn't access institutional resources bringing new products to market.
The biosecurity dimension is also real. As tools spread, the question of who is using them, for what purposes, and under what oversight becomes more pressing. The current framework — voluntary guidelines, community lab safety committees, DNA synthesis screening — has worked reasonably well for relatively low-capability amateur work. Whether it scales adequately as capabilities increase is an open question.
The most thoughtful responses to this involve "proactive biosecurity" — designing tools from the ground up with safety features, building screening into synthesis infrastructure, developing rapid detection capabilities for potential misuse. This is the difference between trying to lock a door after the technology has already spread, and designing the technology with safety architecture from the start.
What all three scenarios share is that they are shaped more by governance choices than by the biology itself. The technology creates possibilities; what happens depends on the decisions people make about how to use it, regulate it, and distribute its benefits and risks.
Next lesson: What Are You Taking Away? — the synthesis, and what to hold onto from these eleven lessons.
Reading time: approx. 9–10 minutes