Nancy J Kelley + Associates

GP-write Scientific Working Meeting was held at the Joseph P Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA.

Since the May, 2017 meeting, the following nine working groups have been working hard on their charters, roadmaps and white papers and the Scientific Executive Committee has identified the first lead project for GP-write which was discussed at the May meeting.

• Scientific Executive Committee
• Ethical, Legal and Social Advisory Board/Policy
• Technology and Infrastructure Development
• High Performance Computing and Data Infrastructure
• Safety Engineering
• Standards, Quality Control and Reporting
• Intellectual Property
• Communications and Public Outreach
• Education

The aim of the meeting was to further advance the goals of GP-write, which are to understand the blueprint of life, to reduce the cost of engineering and testing large genomes in cell lines, and to develop new tools and technologies for engineering biology. This was a Scientific Working Meeting where each of the working groups reported on their progress, and break-out sessions were held to discuss areas of overlap between groups and enable open discussion and synergy.

The meeting concluded with an evening reception. 

A press briefing was also held after the meeting to summarize proceedings and next steps for the project.

As many of you know from attending the meeting in May, 2017, it was oversubscribed with nearly 250 attendees from 10 countries, exploring the concrete steps that GP- write can take to solve some of the most important problems facing humanity, including how to move towards a sustainable, biological-based economy? How to further advance cures for disease? How to better understand biology processes? How to responsibly communicate the risks and benefits of this project to the world? The Agenda also included the introduction of new pilot projects, as well as the commencement of GP-write working groups.

The meeting participants were academic and industry scientists, ethicists, lawyers, educators, citizen scientists, artists, policymakers, technologists and lay people. This meeting also attracted a great deal of interest from the scientific press, many of whom were on-site throughout the meeting attending the presentations, as well as a press briefing and tour of the genome foundry at the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health.

GP-write will build on the knowledge and technological advances of the Human Genome Project, and could be an equally transformative next step. Focused on writing, editing and building large genomes, the project will generate a wealth of information connecting the sequence of nucleotide bases in DNA with their physiological properties and functional behaviors, enabling the development of safer, less costly and more effective therapeutics and a broad range of applications in other areas such as energy, agriculture, healthcare, chemicals and bioremediation. Another proposed benefit would be the commercial development of new genomics analysis, design, synthesis, assembly and testing technologies, with the goal of making these technologies affordable and widely available to everyone.