Why is synthetic biology important?

I just came across an article titled "Why Synthetic Biology Is the Field of the Future", which may be a perfect answer to this question. As the author wrote in this article, synthetic biology focuses on creating technologies for designing and building biological organisms. A multidisciplinary effort, it calls biologists, engineers, software developers, and others to collaborate on finding ways to understand how genetic parts work together, and then to combine them to produce useful applications. In medicine, the synthetic biology community is pushing the boundaries by designing microbes that will seek and destroy tumors in the body before self-destructing. Synthetic biology also provides us a way to clean up our environment. We can build organisms to consume toxic chemicals in water or soil that would not otherwise decompose, for example. It can also help us to better understand flu strains and create vaccines. Synthetic biology will even help us feed the world. At MIT, researchers are working to build a process that will allow plants to fix nitrogen. If successful, farmers will no longer require fertilizer for their crops.

Reference

Why Synthetic Biology Is the Field of the Future. Archived from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/why-synthetic-biology-is-the-field-of-the-future/.