Astrobiology is a scientific field within the life and environmental sciences that studies the origins, early evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe by investigating its deterministic conditions and contingent events. As a discipline, astrobiology is founded on the premise that life may exist beyond Earth.
Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable for humans to live on.
STS-47 was NASA's 50th Space Shuttle mission of the program, as well as the second mission of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The mission mainly involved conducting experiments in life and material sciences inside Spacelab-J, a collaborative laboratory inside the shuttle's payload bay sponsored by NASA and the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). This mission carried Mamoru Mohri, the first Japanese astronaut aboard the shuttle, Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go to space, and the only married couple to fly together on the shuttle, Mark C. Lee and Jan Davis, which had been against NASA policy prior to this mission.
Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a multidisciplinary field of science that focuses on living systems and organisms, and it applies engineering principles to develop new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing systems found in nature.
George McDonald Church is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Biobased economy, bioeconomy or biotechonomy is economic activity involving the use of biotechnology and biomass in the production of goods, services, or energy. The terms are widely used by regional development agencies, national and international organizations, and biotechnology companies. They are closely linked to the evolution of the biotechnology industry and the capacity to study, understand, and manipulate genetic material that has been possible due to scientific research and technological development. This includes the application of scientific and technological developments to agriculture, health, chemical, and energy industries.
Christopher Voigt is an American synthetic biologist, molecular biophysicist, and engineer.
The Methuselah Foundation is an American-based global non-profit organization based in Springfield, Virginia, with a declared mission to "make 90 the new 50 by 2030" by supporting tissue engineering and regenerative medicine therapies. The organization was originally incorporated by David Gobel in 2001 as the Performance Prize Society, a name inspired by the British government’s Longitude Act, which offered monetary rewards for anyone who could devise a portable, practical solution for determining a ship's longitude.
The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is a nonprofit research and technology commercialization institute affiliated with three University of California campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area: Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. QB3's domain is the quantitative biosciences: areas of biology in which advances are chiefly made by scientists applying techniques from physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science.
Tardigrades, known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. They were first described by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773, who called them Kleiner Wasserbär'little water bear'. In 1776, the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani named them Tardigrada, which means 'slow steppers'.
Lynn Justine Rothschild is an evolutionary biologist, astrobiologist and synthetic biologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is an adjunct professor at Brown University. She is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches Astrobiology and Space Exploration. At Ames, her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both on Earth and potentially beyond our planet's boundaries. Her research also explores the use of synthetic biology as an enabling tool for space travel. Since 2007, she has studied the effect of UV radiation on DNA synthesis, carbon metabolism and mutation/DNA repair in the Rift Valley of Kenya and the Bolivian Andes, and also in high altitude experiments atop Mount Everest, in balloon payloads with BioLaunch. She was the principal investigator of the first free-flyer synthetic biology payload which flew on the DLR EuCROPIS mission. In 2024, she received a Phase III NIAC grant to explore the use of fungi for constructing habitats on the Moon or Mars.
Wendell Lim is an American biochemist who is the Byer's Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the director of the UCSF Cell Design Institute. He earned his A.B. in chemistry from Harvard University working with Jeremy Knowles on enzyme evolutionary optimization. He obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Bob Sauer using genetic and biophysical approaches to understand the role of hydrophobic core interactions in protein folding. He then did his postdoctoral work with Frederic Richards at Yale University on the structure of protein interaction domains. Lim's work has focused on cell signaling, synthetic biology, and cell engineering, particularly in immune cells.
Synthetic virology is a branch of virology engaged in the study and engineering of synthetic man-made viruses. It is a multidisciplinary research field at the intersection of virology, synthetic biology, computational biology, and DNA nanotechnology, from which it borrows and integrates its concepts and methodologies. There is a wide range of applications for synthetic viral technology such as medical treatments, investigative tools, and reviving organisms.
ATUM is an American biotechnology company. ATUM provides tools for the design and synthesis of optimized DNA, as well as protein production and GMP cell line development.
Christina Smolke is an American synthetic biologist whose primary research is in the use of yeast to produce opioids for medical use. She is a Full Professor of Bioengineering and of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. She is the editor of The metabolic pathway engineering handbook (2010). She is an advisory board member for Integrative Biology.
Karmella Ann Haynes is a biomedical engineer and associate professor at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. She researches how chromatin is used to control cell development in biological tissue.
Christina Maria Agapakis is a synthetic biologist, science writer. She is the Creative Director of the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks.
Hachimoji DNA is a synthetic nucleic acid analog that uses four synthetic nucleotides in addition to the four present in the natural nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. This leads to four allowed base pairs: two unnatural base pairs formed by the synthetic nucleobases in addition to the two normal pairs. Hachimoji bases have been demonstrated in both DNA and RNA analogs, using deoxyribose and ribose respectively as the backbone sugar.
A living medicine is a type of biologic that consists of a living organism that is used to treat a disease. This usually takes the form of a cell or a virus that has been genetically engineered to possess therapeutic properties that is injected into a patient. Perhaps the oldest use of a living medicine is the use of leeches for bloodletting, though living medicines have advanced tremendously since that time.
Elizabeth Anne Specht is an American research scientist who is Vice President for Science and Technology at The Good Food Institute. She leads the development of a roadmap for the acceleration of alternative protein research. In 2022, Vox named her in one of their "Future Perfect 50".
