Human Practice

Is this the future of Synthetic Biology?

Should Synthetic Biology go open source?

With the rise of the home computer in the second half of the 20th century more and more people became not only users of software, but also developers of software. They opened a door to a fascinating world: You don't need huge machinery and manpower to develop software products, but only a home computer. Quickly people became aware of flaws in commercial problems some of which could be easily fixed if only the source code was available. But the software companies kept these source codes secret for they considered them their intellectual property.
The result of this situation was the emergence of the open source movement.
In many aspects the situation of Synthetic Biology today is somewhat similar. The construction of physical DNA becomes more and more affordable and as time progresses actively taking part in the field of Synthetic Biology becomes an option for more and more people.