Panel discussion shared with the Designer Biology conference
This session will feature a panel of four distinguished practitioners from the fields of Artificial Life and Synthetic Biology research. Drs Kate Adamala, Erik Homms, Nicola Patron and Alex Penn will present their views on how some global societal challenges might be addressed from their disciplinary perspective, before opening up to the floor and engaging in a wider debate and discussion.
Artificial Life researchers have recently become interested in how their work on complex adaptive systems might be of benefit to policymakers and Synthetic Biology has been described by politicians as the technology that will ‘heal us, heat and feed us’. Proponents of these areas of study identify many of the UN sustainable development goals as targets for real-world applications of these sciences. This panel will explore how the two disciplines might fruitfully work together to address areas of interest including 'food' (feeding the world, new types of food, scientific food production and green politics), ‘energy’ (novel energy production, global warming), and ‘health’ (personalised medicine and public health programmes).