Conference, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center, Irvine California, November 20-22, 2009

Synthetic biology is an innovative and growing field that unites engineering and biology. It builds on the powerful research that came about as a result of a recombinant DNA technology and genome sequencing. By definition, synthetic biology is an interdisciplinary enterprise comprising biologists of many specialties, engineers, physicists, computer scientists and others. It promises a fundamentally deeper understanding of how living systems work and the capacity to recreate them for medicine, public health and the environment, including renewable energy. NAKFI Synthetic Biology: Building a Nation's Inspiration discusses new foundational technologies and tools required to make biology easier to engineer, considers ethical issues unique to synthetic biology, explores how synthetic biology can lead to an understanding of the principles underlying natural genetic circuits and debates how synthetic biology can be used to answer fundamental biological questions.