Dalla creazione alla programmazione. Il concetto di vita nell’era della biologia sintetica

This paper aims to organize a reflection about the recent developing field of synthetic biology. It is structured into three main parts. The first one tries to point out the features of this emerging field (the analogies and the differences with the genetic engineering); the second one analyzes the terms and the concepts we can find in the fundamental article by Venter et al. (and in the recent article published by La Jolla Institute’s researchers); the third one delineates the principal outcomes of synthetic biology’s applications, in particular, for the formulation of the concept of life. Therefore it is proposed a connection between artificial life’s science and human enhancement. In fact I think it is possible to clarify human enhancement problem by a specific investigation of synthetic biology’s main characteristics.