(from Pui-Wing Tam of the Wall Street Journal)

Silicon Valley has sprouted numerous "hacker spaces" in recent years, where software geeks get together to program and build new Web creations. Now there's a hangout for "biohackers," too.

To encourage new collaborative projects that promote the safe and constructive growth of synthetic biology, the SynBERC Scholars of Practice Program welcomes outstanding scholars and practitioners at all career stages and from a broad range of fields to work with us in addressing interdisciplinary challenges in advancing synthetic biology.

SynBERC has created a Drupal 6 version of its own intranet tools intended to assist other ERCs in setting up their own sites. A brief presentation outlining the features of the system is available. (Drupal is the content management system that synberc.org is built upon.)

The installation requires a web server with, at a minimum, the following technologies:

President Obama's Bioethics Commission was convened to examine the safety and ethical issues around the emerging field of synthetic biology. The Commission offered its assessment to President Obama on December 16, 2010. Among the Commission's eighteen key recommendations:

The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.

Prairie View A&M University and the SynBERC Student Leadership Council hosted the second Synthetic Biology Symposium on Friday, November 5, 2010, at the Willie A. Templeton Sr. Memorial Student Center on the Prairie View A&M University campus.

Synthetic biology is an exciting new field of research that combines classic molecular biology and innovative bioengineering techniques. It focuses on the design and construction of new biological entities, such as enzymes, genetic circuits, and cells, and on the redesign of existing biological systems.

The New York Times is running a long piece on one team's efforts in the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition at MIT: