Search results for "Nuts and bolts"

Biological Standards and Biosecurity: The Unexplored Link

2021

AbstractThe issue of standardisation in Synthetic Biology has important implications at both the technical and governance levels. At the former, standardisation in biology (a still-ongoing process) is expected to exponentially increase the potential of synthetic biology by democratising, easing and expanding our ability to engineer life. Indeed, it has to be stressed that Synthetic Biology is -or at least aims at being- a fully engineering discipline. And engineering, from industrial to electronics, largely relies on standards. A standard is a part, piece, device or procedure with well-established properties, and which can reliably be used in a broad range of industrial applications. Standa…

Not Another Set of Nuts and Bolts

2011

Confidence, tolerance, and allowance in biological engineering: The nuts and bolts of living things

2014

The emphasis of systems and synthetic biology on quantitative understanding of biological objects and their eventual re-design has raised the question of whether description and construction standards that are commonplace in electric and mechanical engineering are applicable to live systems. The tuning of genetic devices to deliver a given activity is generally context-dependent, thereby undermining the re-usability of parts, and predictability of function, necessary for manufacturing new biological objects. Tolerance (acceptable limits within the unavoidable divergence of a nominal value) and allowance (deviation introduced on purpose for the sake of flexibility and hence modularity, i.e. …

Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Jon Elster. Cambridge University Press, 2007, xi + 484 pages.

2009