When you hear "biology" you probably think something like "nature" or "natural", but humankind has been interfering with biology for thousands of years, and now in the 21st century our tools are more powerful than ever. We've gone from crudely breeding plants and animals over generations to meet our needs, to simply creating the biology we need from scratch. You may not be aware of it, but our mastery of biology has been quietly exploding, and it won't be long before the fruits of this labor become apparent. Synthetic Biology Gets Its Name in the 1910s, but Captures Imaginations in the 70s While the concept of modifying living organisms has existed for centuries, the term "synthetic biology" was first coined in the 1910s. It was used by a French biologist named Stéphane Leduc in a publication titled Théorie physico-chimique de la vie et générations spontanées and again two years later in La Biologie Synthétique. Later, Wacław Szybalski popularized the term in 1974 in reference to genetic engineering, but little did he know that one day synthetic biology would be about more than simply manipulating life that already exists. Humans Patent Life in 1981 If you genetically modify an organism to make a living thing that can perform a function you can profit from, can you patent it? That was the big question in 1981 when Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty was awarded a patent. Patent 4,259,444 was for a GMO microbe and had been applied for all the way back in 1972. The microbe in question was engineered to eat oil, with the idea that it could be used to safely clean up oil spills. While the invention wasn't developed because GE found other better solutions, the patent itself is historically significant, because it set a precedent that you could effectively patent life itself. We Map Our Own Genome in the 90s Before I ultimately went on to study psychology, as a child I'd actually been interested in studying genetics instead. In the 90s I read about the Human Genome…