Carlson’s Curve
In 1965 Gordon Moore published the paper that gave birth to his famous “law” that the power of computers, as measured by the number of transistors that could be fitted on a silicon chip, would double every 18 months or so.
Four decades later, some graphs of the growing efficiency of DNA synthesis that Rob Carlson drew look suspiciously like the biological equivalent of Moore’s law. By the end of the decade their practical upshot will, if they continue to hold true, be the power to synthesise a string of DNA the size of a human genome in a day.
Currently, what passes for genetic engineering is merely moving genes one at a time from species to species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful as insecticides. The Carlson curve is making more radical redesigns possible.
The field’s pioneers have dubbed their fledgling discipline “synthetic biology.”