On July 30, Dr. Ellington visited Cold Spring Harbor Labs (CSHL) in New York to deliver a lecture to the Synthetic Biology Summer Course, “The Tenuous Balance Between Systems and Synthetic Biology.” Because of the centrality of both systems and synthetic biology in the Center for Systems and Synthetic biology (duh), Dr. Ellington could bridge between Ed Marcotte’s fundamental work on phenologs and yeast humanization to his own work on augmenting the genetic code and developing orthogonal control systems for organisms. The CSHL course is a mainstay of students learning to enter the field of synthetic biology, and the diversity in backgrounds was fascinating. The beer was even better (still not sure about the raspberry ale).
