If discovery is the systematic exploration of the world around us, then the design is the mainstay of engineering — where concepts learned in the scientific arena are employed to build everything around us in a repeatable, less time-consuming and more predictable manner. The way things are right now, we design bridges, but we discover drugs & biological solutions.
The goal is to bring design & engineering into biology to ‘design’ new organisms & re-design existing ones. There is no reason why we should not be able to do so for our medicines and bodies.
Borrowing from engineering, here are principles that allow us to harness biology:
*PRINCIPLE 1: LEGO-LIKE BUILDING BLOCKS*
Biology has a hierarchical nature: amino acids are made from atoms; proteins from amino acids; and so on till we go up till organisms. Evolution is the ultimate algorithm. And the ability to facilitate ‘artificial’ evolution using selective pressure (meta-evolution) has allowed researchers and entrepreneurs to ‘program’ cells.
Once we identify the Legos in biology and their properties, we can engineer them and even mix and match them to design novel functionality.
*PRINCIPLE 2: REPEATABILITY AND REPRODUCIBILITY*
Almost ‘hand-crafted’ nature of biological experiments even today makes most experiments more art than science. They are difficult to repeat & reproduce because of 1000s of input metrics that can change the results completely. Introducing new technologies such as machine learning & robotics into the process, however, can turn this handcrafting into assembly-line production which is highly repeatable, scalable & reproducible.
*PRINCIPLE 3: TESTING AND PROCESS ENGINEERING*
Testing is the ability to understand exactly where a given product/diagnostic/drug stands by engineering & measuring key performance indicators (KPIs)
*PRINCIPLE 4: BORROWING FROM OTHER DISCIPLINES*
An obvious approach to bring engineering into biology is to apply existing engineering disciplines — materials, chemical, electrical, mechanical, and so on — in the biological realm.
*PRINCIPLE 5: REINVENTING THE PROCESS ITSELF*
The challenge lies in breaking down such “big hairy audacious goals” (aka BHAGs) into more doable steps of engineering, and often reinventing the process itself.
But once the desire to consistently improve performance moves biology from bespoke, artisanal approaches to design scalable processes, even seemingly modest performance increases can make a difference.
Read the article here: How to Engineer Biology — Scientific American Blog Network
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From the desk of Aditya Khanduri
About me (Why I started Polygyan)
