Challenges and opportunities for synthetic biology

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined living organisms as objects with an intrinsic purpose, which are self-organized in such a way that every part is a function of the whole and the whole is a function of every part, and in which “nothing is for nothing”. Kant already anticipated the tension between agency and structure, and between forward and backward causation. He also perceived living beings as entities that, being extremely complex, are not amenable to descriptions based on laws that are similar to the fundamental laws of physics: “There will never be a Newton of a grass blade,” he wrote. Less metaphorically, Kant believed that science would not be able to understand living entities by focusing exclusively on their component parts, and, therefore, that it would never be able to explain a whole organism completely and exhaustively.