Can synthetic biology shed light on the origin of life?
Biological Theory 4 (4):357-367 (2009)
Abstract
It is a most commonly accepted hypothesis that life originated from inanimate matter, somehow being a synthetic product of organic aggregates, and as such, a result of some sort of prebiotic synthetic biology. In the past decades, the newly formed scientific discipline of synthetic biology has set ambitious goals by pursuing the complete design and production of genetic circuits, entire genomes or even whole organisms. In this paper, I argue that synthetic biology might also shed some novel and interesting perspectives on the question of the origin of life, and that, in addition, it might challenge our most commonly accepted definitions of life, thereby changing the ways we might think about life and its origin.Author's Profile
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2015
DOI
10.1162/biot_a_00002
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Citations of this work
Dealing with the changeable and blurry edges of living things: a modified version of property-cluster kinds.María J. Ferreira Ruiz & Jon Umerez - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):493-518.
Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Knowledge.Christophe Malaterre - 2013 - Biological Theory (8):346–356.
References found in this work
What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell.Erwin Schrödinger - 1944 - Cambridge University Press.
Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines.Evelyn Fox Keller - 2002 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Making Knowledge in Synthetic Biology: Design Meets Kludge.Maureen A. O’Malley - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (4):378-389.