Synthetic biology: From a word to a world

The term synthetic biology was first introduced by the French scientist Stéphane Leduc (1912), be it with a different meaning as today’s, and (it seems) in modern times by the Polish geneticist Waclaw Szybalski (1974). Putting aside priority questions it is true that the term gained popularity in mainstream science only in the year 2004 when the first international meeting, called Synthetic Biology 1.0, was held at MIT. Envisaging loads of other applications scientists nowadays declare that they can do better than evolution (Schuster, 2013). Among other aspects, Schuster points to promising aspects for information storage, recalling a pilot study (Church et al., 2012) in which an entire book was stored on a single DNA molecule. The purpose of this investigation is to reveal the what – where when of the current situation in this emerging field. In particular, we calculated “year based h-type indices” for highfrequent keywords.