(from Pui-Wing Tam of the Wall Street Journal)

Silicon Valley has sprouted numerous "hacker spaces" in recent years, where software geeks get together to program and build new Web creations. Now there's a hangout for "biohackers," too.

[img_assist|nid=4601|title=|desc=In previous research, Rice synthetic biologist Jeff Tabor and colleagues created colonies of light-sensitive bacteria that exhibited complex patterns when exposed to images, like this portrait of Albert Einstein.

SynBERC researchers at Harvard are a step closer to engineering new "words" in the DNA language of bacteria by co-opting one of the codons in its genetic code to give it new meaning. In the July 15 2011 edition of Science, George Church's group describes its genome engineering technologies that are capable of fundamentally reengineering genomes by expanding the number of DNA codons it can read.

On May 3, 2011 the National Academy of Sciences announced the election of George Church to its membership in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Dr. Church is a leader in the fields of computational genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, systems biology, bio-engineering, and technology development.

The National Academy of Sciences is an honorific society whose members are distinguished scholars in science and engineering. The NAS provides independent advice to the United States government on scientific and technological issues.

Chris Voigt, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, will join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in July. He will be an associate professor of biological engineering and co-director of a center for synthetic biology [details forthcoming]. Voigt serves as the leader of the Devices thrust and Industry Testbed within SynBERC.

SynBERC Deputy Director Wendell Lim and cell biologists at UCSF have received $15.4 million from the National Institutes of Health to set up one of two new National Centers for Systems Biology, to study how cells respond to their environment – an emerging field of research that could revolutionize medicine by creating “smart cells” to deliver medications and other therapeutics more effectively.

SynBERC researcher George Church was awarded the 2011 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science for innovative and creative contributions to genomic science, including the development of DNA sequencing technologies, as well as for his subsequent efforts to promote personal genomics and synthetic biology. The Institute noted his pioneering founding of the Personal Genome Project, which promises to spawn a new era of individualized medicine in which drug treatments and other therapies can be optimized by custom-matching them with a person's unique genetic makeup.

President Obama's Bioethics Commission was convened to examine the safety and ethical issues around the emerging field of synthetic biology. The Commission offered its assessment to President Obama on December 16, 2010. Among the Commission's eighteen key recommendations:

The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.