Professor Pamela Silver of Harvard Medical School (HMS) believes
in biology’s potential to change the world. She sees a future
where scientists routinely wield microbes against disease, using
computers to turn bacteria into microscopic drug factories
rapidly assembled from off-the-shelf biological parts. She sees
crops easing world hunger after being enhanced with the genes of
extreme bacteria that give plants a second way to convert
sunlight into biomass. She sees a future where the cells of
astronauts remember if they’ve been damaged by gamma rays,
alerting doctors before cancer starts to grow. Silver, a leader
in the relatively new field of synthetic biology, is working
toward that future, running multiple projects in two labs that
employ nearly two dozen fellows, graduate students,
undergraduates, and staff. To Silver, who traces the
discipline’s roots to a meeting at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) a decade ago at which she was the only
molecular biologist, synthetic biology seeks to take