Environmental science and engineering encompass a number of other disciplines, but surely at their core are the biological sciences, from conservation biology and ecology to molecular and cellular biology. It is thus of some import if the boundaries of the biological sciences are shifting.

In this light, the rise of "synthetic biology" is significant. Over the past decades, scientists and engineers have laid the groundwork for, and begun the project of, understanding and designing new forms of life. These efforts, from genetics to agricultural science, have coalesced into a new field called "synthetic biology," sometimes referred to as "plug and play biology."

Synthetic biology merges engineering with biology by, among other things, creating standard biological components that can be mixed and matched in organisms to provide desired functions. This allows researchers to treat biological pathways as if they were components or circuits, and to create organisms from scratch - not to mention extending beyond existing biological systems by, for example, creating life based on different genetic codes than those found in the wild.

MIT, for example, has established a Registry of Standard Biological Parts (“BioBricks”) that can be ordered and plugged into cells, just like electronic components. The 2005 Intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition held at MIT in November 2005 attracted 17 teams, with designs that included bacterial Etch-a-Sketches, photosensitive t-shirts, and bacterial photography systems, thermometers and sensors. Somewhat controversially, a number of viruses have been assembled from scratch, including the viruses for polio and the 1918 flu epidemic.

Other researchers have engineered the genes of Escherichia coli to incorporate a 21st amino acid, opening up an option space for design of biological organisms that has been unavailable for billions of years. Commercialization of these biotechnologies continues to accelerate, led by the introduction in agriculture of genetically modified organism (GMO) technology. But GMO technology extends far beyond agriculture; according to the Economist, in 2004 some 5% of world chemical output was estimated to derive from genetically engineered technologies. Reflecting the on-going commoditization of life, figures for biotechnology patent filings in OECD countries continue to rise sharply.

Synthetic biology does not just reconfigure the biological sciences; the potential implications are far more profound. To begin with, biodiversity becomes a product of design choices, and industrial and political imperatives (security issues, for example), rather than evolutionary pressures. More broadly, the behavior and structure of biological systems increasingly becomes a function of human dynamics and systems, so that understanding biological systems increasingly requires an understanding of the relevant human systems. In short, biology increasingly becomes a cultural science. This dynamic is not new - agriculture and practices such as irrigation have profoundly affected biological systems for millennia; the European and Polynesian cultural factors that lay behind their unprecedented migration and colonization efforts affected virtually all island biologies; and global transportation systems are clearly significantly changing microbial genomic patterns - but its speed and acceleration is.

One important implication of this anthropogenic biology is that the contingency that characterizes human systems comes to characterize biological systems. In an arbitrary and profoundly cultural process, some species are preserved because they are charismatic megafauna: pandas, tigers, or whales. Many, many others go extinct because they are only insects, or plants, or ugly, or unknown; a few, like smallpox, because humans detest and fear them (with the important proviso that, in an age of biotech, national security and terrorism, extinction, at least for viruses and bacteria, is never forever). Others are genetically engineered for desirable characteristics coupled to human aesthetic and economic preferences. A few – raccoons, coyotes, turkey vultures - do very well in human environments, and thus become epiphenomenal on suburbs and exurbia.

A major response to the acceleration of anthropogenic biology has been increasing activism on the part of conservation biologists and environmentalists, intent on preserving the present. Today's zeitgeist still clearly favors them; indeed, since synthetic biologists are mainly technologists, it is doubtful that many traditional biologists are completely aware of the fundamental shifts in the conceptual framework of their field.

As Kuhn noted in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it is often hard for those doing “normal science” to accept – or even perceive - a shift in underlying paradigms. But the gap that opens up in this case is a dangerous one, for biological systems clearly constitute a major earth system, and a continuing failure to understand the implications of the profound shift towards synthetic biology is not one we can afford at the dawn of the Anthropocene.

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Brad Allenby is professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, a fellow at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business, and previously was AT&T's vice president of environment, health, and safety.