Team:Lyon-INSA-ENS/Project/ToGoFurther

Story of Radioactivity

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Many scientific discoveries in physics, biology and computer science happened during the 19th and 20th centuries

The understanding of the structure of matter and in particular atom allowed the discovery and explanation of radioactivity ( observed by H. Becquerel and the Curies ). This natural or artificial property of some elements has been used in several domains like medicine and production of electric energy. The second half of the 20th century will see its industrialization.

Story of living sciences

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In living sciences, progress was slower. The first significant discoveries date from the 16th century.

Then, microbiology rose during the second half of the 19th century with L. Pasteur and other scientists' work.

During the 20th century, discoveries about DNA ( structure, regulation of gene expression, sequencing ) allowed the birth of a new domain : molecular biology.

Then, works on restriction enzymes and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) allow the building of new DNA molecules.

Progress in computer science, increased computing power, new modeling and sequence alignment softwares has now paved the way for synthetic biology.

What about the future ?

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Any industrialization phase has a generally favorable social and economic impact, but also an environmental impact, unfortunately often negative.

Nuclear technology allowed huge progress but at the cost of several consequences : use as weapon, nuclear accidents (Tchernobyl (1986), Fukushima (2011)…) and nuclear waste, with the associated risks of pollution.

We have to consider those same questions with synthetic biology, but we can also go further : by learning from the past, limit our impact by respecting some "good practice" rules, and propose innovative solutions to the problems aroused during the previous century.

After the great discoveries in nuclear physics ( end of 19th c), after the industrialiation phase (20th c),we hope the 21st century will be a century of solutions thanks to synthetic biology, iGEM and, maube, our Cobalt Buster project.