The area of synthetic biology is exploding. Or so it would seem. With Craig Venter, the old hand of genomics now promising everything from bio-energy to solving the climate change crisis, it seems like the solution to the ills of the world. And that ofcourse makes one a little skeptical. To gauge whether this is considered in the community to be overhyped, I thought I’d turn to you the science internet world. If you can click on the options below, I will keep the data and post the survey results. So here goes:
The immediate motivation for this was the SynBio 1.0 meeting recently concluded at Indrashil university, funded by the Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt. of India (SERB). With speakers ranging from the Genomics Czar of India, Dr. Samir Brahmachari doing forecasting of future revolutions in genomics, to metabolic engineering of Tobacco plants from ICGEB Delhi, and an editor from Nature-Springer speaking about predatory journals, it was a rather wide palette.
The most interesting development was to see the enthusiastic students from Jawaharlal Nehru Univ. (JNU) from the 6-month SynthBio training course. These post-grads might become the future trained persons who could be the drivers of new research in India.