Jay Keasling, the CEO DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) http://www.jbei.org/ and Professor of Chemistry Engineering and Bioengineering at UC Berkeley thinks so. I heard him give a keynote presentation at the DOE Joint Genome Institute's (JGI) annual meeting this week. Keasling gave a captivating talk about how to apply engineering principles to biology. He said that if you want to build a computer, you don't start from scratch. You make a design, buy the components that are manufactured by someone else, and then build your computer. He then made the same analogy to engineering a chemical plant. You decide what you want to manufacture, you design a factory, and then go buy parts for the factory - all of which will have standard fittings, connections, and sizes. He suggest that in theory, we should be able to engineer biology in the same way.
The biggest difference however, is that with computers and chemical factories, there is a knowledge base to build on. Biology does have a knowledge base of sorts, but not exactly. Most scientist conduct experiments in their own labs their own way, and often do not provide the data or knowledge to the public in any useful way in which to build on. Keasling suggested that we work to standardize and share. The day before his talk, I attended a workshop led by DOE and JGI about how to build a "knowledgebase" database for biology and how to standardize our data so that it can be shared. After the intro to Keasling's talk, it all started to make sense. I understood DOE's motivation for the knowledgebase- after all, the mission of the JGI is "to advance genomics in support of the DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup."
After sitting in a workshop all day hearing contradictory views on making standardization protocols (standardizations can stifle creativity), different ideas about work flows, varying estimates of data sizes, and differential needs of the community, I was a bit skeptical that we would see a functioning "knowledgebase" for the genoimics community any time soon. Its not that JGI or the scientists involved aren't doing a good job - I have put my ideas in the hat - but this is a really hard problem, made even harder by the system of funding and tenure in academia, which publishes most of the genomic data. Academic science is about competition for grant money, which doesn't always promote sharing and most labs find their own ways to do analyze data. In computer engineering, parts are standardized because that is the most efficient way to do it and everyone makes more money. For biology to be standardized to encourage efficient engineering, ideally there would be more money for research and the results would be open sourced. JGI and JBEI are part of the government and thus are trying to generate this type of open source data for the community.
Going on the really interesting things Kealing had to say about his group's success in engineering lipid biosynthesis pathway into E. coli, along with complementary gene pathways for breaking down cellulose into sugar to feed itself and exporters to export the newly synthesized lipids out of the cell for easy harvesting, I'd imagine that we will start to see some real progress in this area soon.
If you are interested in JGI's energy genomics program, see this new promotional video they made with ex'pression college for visual arts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qchN5FX_QN0
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