Advances in our scientific understanding and technological power in recent decades have dramatically amplified our capacity to intentionally manipulate complex ecological and biological systems. An implication of this is that biological and ecological problems are increasingly understood and approached from an engineering perspective. In environmental contexts, this is exemplified in the pursuits of geoengineering, designer ecosystems, and conservation cloning. In human health contexts, it is exemplified in the development of synthetic biology, bionanotechnology, and human enhancement technologies. Designer Biology: The Ethics of Intensively Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems consists of thirteen chapters (twelve of them original to the collection) that address the ethical issues raised by technological intervention and design across a broad range of biological and ecological systems. Among the technologies addressed are geoengineering, human enhancement, sex selection, genetic modification, and synthetic biology. This collection advances and enriches our understanding of the ethical issues raised by these technologies and identifies general lessons about the ethics of engineering complex biological and ecological systems that can be applied as new technologies and practices emerge. The insights that emerge will be especially valuable to students and scholars of environmental ethics, bioethics, or technology ethics.

In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.

Modern biotechnologies give us unprecedented control of the fundamental building blocks of life. For designers, across a range of disciplines, emerging fields such as synthetic biology offer the promise of new sustainable materials and structures which may be grown, are self-assembling, self-healing and adaptable to change. While there is a thriving speculative discourse on the future of design in the age of biotechnology, there are few realized design applications. This book, the first in the Bio Design series, acts as a bridge between design speculation and scientific reality and between contemporary design thinking, in areas such as architecture, product design and fashion design, and the traditional engineering approaches which currently dominate biotechnologies. Filled with real examples, Living Construction reveals how living cells construct and transform materials through methods of fabrication and assembly at multiple scales and how designers can utilize these processes.

The effective design of scientific experiments is critical to success, yet graduate students receive very little formal training in how to do it. Based on a well-received course taught by the author, Experimental Design for Biologistsfills this gap. Experimental Design for Biologistsexplains how to establish the framework for an experimental project, how to set up a system, design experiments within that system, and how to determine and use the correct set of controls. Separate chapters are devoted to negative controls, positive controls, and other categories of controls that are perhaps less recognized, such as “assumption controls†and “experimentalist controls†. Furthermore, there are sections on establishing the experimental system, which include performing critical “system controls†. Should all experimental plans be hypothesis-driven? Is a question/answer approach more appropriate? What was the hypothesis behind the Human Genome Project? What color is the sky? How does one get to Carnegie Hall? The answers to these kinds of questions can be found in Experimental Design for Biologists. Written in an engaging manner, the book provides compelling lessons in framing an experimental question, establishing a validated system to answer the question, and deriving verifiable models from experimental data. Experimental Design for Biologistsis an essential source of theory and practical guidance in designing a research plan.

As synthetic biology transforms living matter into a medium for making, what is the role of design and its associated values?

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Foreword: Reinventing Nature -- Acknowledgments -- Part I Design Research in Practice: Methodology and Approach with Historical Precedents and Case Studies -- 1 Bioconstructivisms -- Trans-Disciplinary Research Practice: Contemporary Case Studies -- 2 Design Research in Practice: A New Model -- Part II Design Computation Tools for Architecture and Science: New Tools and Forms -- Introduction to Design Computation Tools for Architecture and Science: New Tools and Forms -- 3 Networking: Elasticity and Branching Morphogenesis -- Comments on the Role of the Matrix -- New Architectural Concerns -- 4 Motility: Adaptive Architecture and Personalized Medicine -- Topologically Free Cells -- Avoiding Biomimicry -- Visualizing in Another Dimension -- Positioning Mechanism -- Newness -- 5 Surface Design: The Mammary Gland as a Model of Architectural Connectivity -- On Geometry and Cellular Mechanics -- Biological Data and Intuition -- Case Study: Understanding Behavioral Rule Sets through Cell Motility -- Case Study: Motility and the Observation of Change -- Case Study: Microfabrication: Spatializing Cell Signaling and Sensing Mechanisms -- 6 BioInspired Materials and Design -- Part III Architectural Prototyping: Human-Scale Material Systems and Big Datascapes -- 7 The New Science of Making -- 8 Matter Design Computation: Biosynthesis and New Paradigms of Making -- Project: Branching Morphogenesis, 2008 -- Project: Ground Substance, 2009 -- Workshop: Nonlinear Systems Biology and Design, 2010 -- Part IV Personalized Architecture and Medicine -- 9 eSkin: BioInspired Adaptive Materials -- 10 myThread Pavilion -- Interview: RE(IN)FORM(ULAT)ING Health Care via Medicine + Creativity -- Conclusion -- Notes on Contributors -- Image Credits -- Index

Today’s synthetic biologists are in the early stages of engineering living cells to help treat diseases, sense toxic compounds in the environment, and produce valuable drugs. With this manual, you can be part of it. Based on the BioBuilder curriculum, this valuable book provides open-access, modular, hands-on lessons in synthetic biology for secondary and post-secondary classrooms and laboratories. It also serves as an introduction to the field for science and engineering enthusiasts. Developed at MIT in collaboration with award-winning high school teachers, BioBuilder teaches the foundational ideas of the emerging synthetic biology field, as well as key aspects of biological engineering that researchers are exploring in labs throughout the world. These lessons will empower teachers and students to explore and be part of solving persistent real-world challenges. Learn the fundamentals of biodesign and DNA engineering Explore important ethical issues raised by examples of synthetic biology Investigate the BioBuilder labs that probe the design-build-test cycle Test synthetic living systems designed and built by engineers Measure several variants of an enzyme-generating genetic circuit Model "bacterial photography" that changes a strain’s light sensitivity Build living systems to produce purple or green pigment Optimize baker’s yeast to produce ?-carotene