What you're seeing here (and in other places), is us advancing to the tool-making stage of biological nanotechnologies. And this is one aspect of it. We've be

What you're seeing here (and in other places), is us advancing to the tool-making stage of biological nanotechnologies. And this is one aspect of it. We've been gorging on grounded knowledge in the past 2 decades with the ability to readily read DNA, and we're now at the stage where there are enough robust tools in enough different biological disciplines that we no longer just 'find' tools, but we can actually start to create them. Between companies providing the ability to cheaply synthesize DNA in bulk (Twist), companies essentially doing machine-guided evolution on bacteria (Zymergen), synthetic therapeutic circuitry (Cell Design Labs), and a host of brand new entrants to the synthetic biology space, we've a lot more capability than we did just a few years ago. We've found enough stones that we're now starting to build our own primitive (3D, atomically precise, wet, self-replicating nanotechnology) tools. CARs, SynNotch, HBB[T87Q] are all creative upgrades to existing biological systems used where our own bodies have failed, and all only very recently effectively delivered. And we can achieve those pragmatic wins without having a complete and thorough understanding of the entire system.