Drew Endy draws a distinction between bioengineering and engineering biology. Bioengineering, he says, has been about applying engineering principles to biology, to aid scientific discovery for clinical applications such as tissue transplants, or to build machines for diagnostics or data analysis. Engineering biology, also known as synthetic biology, involves imbuing biological forms with new functions, or creating new forms from existing biological components. His review article (see page 449) makes the case for standardizing technologies and methods in synthetic biology so that scientists can build new functions and applications from others' work. Nature caught up with Endy to discuss this growing field.

You start your review with a sort of synthetic-biology quiz. Why this approach?

For most types of engineering, these example problems would be fairly simple to solve. But for synthetic biology, they are incredibly challenging. The examples are designed to illustrate how inept we are at engineering biology. We can program computers but we can't easily programme new DNA functions.

Nanotechnology became a buzzword that some say was really just a trendy rebranding of chemistry. Can the same be said of synthetic biology?

Synthetic biology is not new in terms of inspiration or aspiration. In putting this review together, I came across an article published 27 years ago that talked about synthetic biology. And people have always wanted to manipulate cells. The question is how come we're still not able to do it reliably?

Why the need for a review article now?

Most people working in bioengineering are helping to discover life processes, they're not manipulating life. We hope the article will help inspire and motivate people to do the work.

What ethical concerns does this field face?

Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University in Illinois has done a great job collecting those. She's been giving some very interesting talks on the ethics of synthetic biology — and they are webcast (see http://www.syntheticbiology.org).

What problems in public acceptance do you anticipate?

We have three relationships with the natural world: the pre-darwinian view that the natural world doesn't change; the darwinian view that the natural world changes under certain rules; and, under synthetic biology, the view that theoretically, we can change the world. People in some places are still having problems with the second one.