Standards. The building blocks of complexity, is the latest issue of the Mètode journal, and it focuses on standards in science, with special emphasis on synthetic biology; an area in which, mainly because of its complexity, standardisation still encounters resistance.
The issue is coordinated by the Principle Investigators of the BioRoboost project, Juli Peretó – professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Valencia – and Manuel Porcar – researcher at the Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology group of I2SysBio at the University of Valencia. Here are some of the articles you can find in this issue:
- Standards, by Juli Peretó and Manel Porcar
- When biology became engineering, by Víctor de Lorenzo (researcher at the National Centre for Biotechnology)
- Can life be standardized?, by Juli Peretó and Manel Porcar
- Standardisation and social ordering, by Pablo Schyfter (professor at the School of Political Science of the University of Edinburgh)
- The long and winding road, by Sergi Valverde (PhD in Applied Physics and researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology of the Pompeu Fabra University–CSIC)
- Towards the right standards, by Michele Garfinkel (Director of Science Policy at the European Molecular Biology Organisation – EMBO)
