The recently proposed takeover of AstraZeneca by Pfizer has placed the importance of the UK's knowledge base under the spotlight once more. This made Synthetic Biology a particularly fitting focus for my recent Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Prestige Lecture. Synthetic biology was listed second in the top new technologies likely to have major impact on the future world economy at Davos 2012 by the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies. The UK Government has also placed synthetic biology amongst the UK Governments 'Eight Great Technologies' with the potential to propel the UK to future growth. It has committed ￡88m of ￡600m in extra science funding to the field, most recently awarding ￡10m for the establishment of five centres for DNA synthesis across the UK. Many of the critical discoveries related to the study of DNA, which is at the core of synthetic biology, were made in Cambridge in the UK where Francis Crick and James Watson used results from previous studies and X-ray diffraction data to help determine DNA's molecular structure.
展开▼
