What Is Synthetic Biology, Really?

Over at Freelancing Science, Pawel Szczêsny tries his best to clarify what synthetic biology actually means. "My enormous frustration with this field comes from the fact that most of so-called synthetic biology is nothing else than genetic engineering with more systematic approach," he writes. Instead of trying to break biological machines apart and label the pieces, he thinks systems biologists should step in and figure out how all these parts are working together and actually "build a compiler that transforms an abstract description of biological system into sequence understandable by the particular architecture (organism)."