Synthetic Biology

How far can we expect synthetic biology to develop WithinTwentyYears? Enough for medical applications or only for industrial ones? And how far within these applications? I'm pretty sure all of the theoretical groundwork will be completed within 20 years, but what else?

Milestones to reach:

synthesizing chromosomes on a budget
creating artificial cells
developing a standard library of parts
developing CAD software

Refactoring life: http://www.nature.com/msb/journal/v1/n1/full/msb4100025.html

Eventually, in a few decades, the following milestones will be reached:

sequencing an entire individual human's genome in close to real time
synthesizing a human genome on a budget

The synthesis is the limiting factor since sequencing is far ahead of synthesis as it stands.

Now, the first item on the RefactoringTheHumanBody list is to recode the human genome to make us immune to all wild viruses. This will not only be desirable but necessary since synthetic biology will make it easy for a malicious individual or world government (eg, the USA) to create very deadly artificial viruses. The good news is that we'll be free from viral diseases (including the common cold and flu). The bad news is that it will no longer be possible for any two people to reproduce naturally. Which actually isn't such a bad thing.

The reason why people won't be able to reproduce naturally is because they'll be coded differently. This will be necessary because if you recode everyone the same way, you leave open the possibility of a malicious government simply recoding anthrax or some other disease (utterly trivial) and deliberatly infecting someone. Whereas, if you recode everyone slightly differently, then you could make sure that a virus can't potentially infect more than a small percentage of the population. Unless someone deliberately created a cross-platform virus, but that would be terribly inefficient thus still reducing the risk of infection.

There's always the possibility that something will happen (AI uplifting, whatever) that will make this all moot. And of course, it will take a couple generations to go through the entire human population from the time it first becomes possible to recode the human genome. But so long as humans stay humans, this will happen.

American data for causes of death in 2003 from the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_15.pdf) . . .

All causes 2,443,930
1) Diseases of heart 684,462
2) Malignant neoplasms (read:cancer) 554,643
3) Cerebrovascular diseases (read:stroke) 157,803
4) Chronic lower respiratory diseases (prob:emphysema) 126,128
5) Accidents (unintentional injuries (prob:car)) 105,695
6) Diabetes mellitus 73,965
7) Influenza and pneumonia [VIRUSES] 64,847
8) Alzheimer’s disease 63,343
9) Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis (read: kidney failure) 42,536
10) Septicemia (read: bacterial infection) 34,243
11) Intentional self-harm (suicide) 30,642
12) Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis 27,201
13) Essential (primary) hypertension and hypertensive renal disease
14) Parkinson’s disease 17,898
15 ) Pneumonitis due to solids and liquids 17,457
All other causes 421,226

So viruses don't really seem to be particularly important for current-day mortality. Better to go after heart disease and cancer, which together account for half of all American deaths, and probably don't require a total synthetic biological approach (although if you're going to redo biology from scratch, this would be something to include).

You forgot that AIDS has a prevalence of between 5% and 30% in Africa. It's really, really bad. And then there's H5N1 which is going to go pandemic eventually, sometime soon probably. And as pointed out earlier, it's necessary to protect against malicious design and release of viruses. But then again, long before immunizing against viruses can be done it will be possible for someone to make a cross between ebola and influenza. We already have the technology to do it, just not the knowledge how, yet.

Immunizing against wild viruses is interesting because it's something we know how to do. We've known what's required for many years. We just won't have the technology to do it for a very long time. This is perhaps the only case where knowledge far exceeds capability. Usually it's the reverse. You want to eliminate cancer? Good luck, we're still at the stage of discovering whole new classes of theories, nevermind refining them.

Another important milestone:

when someone figures out a systematic way to replace an individual human's genome, not just a little snip here and glue there but wholesale replacement

By the time we can create a new genome cheaply, there will be 10 billion already living humans to take into consideration.