For the new breed of synthetic biologists, creatures are a collection of parts for constructing living machines, as New Scientist discovers.

The turning point for Samantha Sutton came in the second year of her electrical engineering degree, while testing antilock car brakes. “There was something missing,” she says. “I felt the average engineer in my division wasn’t really hacking and constructing as I wanted to. They were fine-tuning, refining. I just didn’t find it terribly exciting.”

To satisfy her inner hacker, Sutton took an unusual step: she switched to biology after graduating. She is now building “circuits” from proteins rather than wires at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she rubs shoulders with other geeks who get their kicks from taking microbes apart and putting them back together in novel ways. For them, genes and proteins are components to be plugged together at will. A bacterial cell, meanwhile, is regarded as a “chassis”, to be stripped down and used as a circuit board and power supply.

They call themselves synthetic biologists, … (requires subscription)