Artificial Natures

摘要

You run the largest research lab at Harvard, the Church Lab, which carries out an extraordinary range of projects in synthetic biology. Your work has a lot in common with architecture; both are about altering human experience. If human experience plays out through the relationship between the body and the environment, perhaps synthetic biology and architecture influence our experience from two different angles: synthetic biology changes bodies, and architecture changes environments. At the recent conference "Genetics, Biomedicine, and the Human Experience in Space," you presented ideas about using genetics to do things that are normally done by altering environments-for instance, by changing our microbi-ome, we might not have to worry as much about creating sterile environments for surgery. Can geneticists change our environments in ways that architects can't? And vice versa?