These techniques are not just a neat scientific trick: Church’s ultimate goals are practical.
He hopes to create organisms that can churn out unnatural amino acids that might have industrial uses, and he foresees the development of bacteria engineered to be resistant to viruses that could cause contamination in the production of biotechnology drugs or food products. The same strategies could be used to tinker with life safely, creating bacteria that could never escape into the wild and contaminate naturally occurring bacteria.
“Much of the effort on synthetic biology has been on the small scale,’’ said James Collins, a professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University. “You’re tinkering and building scaled-down versions, often inspired by electrical engineering, and that’s really for a decade been the focus of synthetic biology… . I think George is really leading the way on developing a platform for genome-scale synthetic biology.’’
Church, along with biologist J. Craig Venter, another leader in the field, have over the past two years marked significant milestones in the growing field. Last year, Venter’s laboratory announced an impressive feat - his team built a genome in the laboratory that functioned when put in a cell.
Instead of trying to write the genome, Church has been developing techniques that can enable large-scale genome editing - essentially tools that will be able to insert, delete, or tweak an organism’s abilities, such as producing a useful chemical or vitamin, or evading infection.
Church is following an interest that has guided him since he was a young scientist - the need to bring more automation to biology, cutting the cost and time of various procedures.
He’s best known as a leader in the quest to read DNA more quickly and cheaply, with the ultimate goal of turning the big feat of sequencing the human genome into a routine tool.
