Wow, thanks for this. Around 2005 or so I was super into synthetic biology but have paid almost no attention since. If you told me this was a speculative "letter from 2020" written back then I would almost believe you, it's so jam-packed with the kind of thing we were expecting. (The obvious stuff, anyway--that the Baker lab's protein design work would be an enabling technology. That some kind of design parallelization was needed to replace hand-construction of gene circuits. That logic and sensors would find practical applications in something like cell-based therapeutics.)

Interesting thing about these revolutions and their makers. Back then I actually went and did a first year grad school rotation in what I thought of as a synthetic biology lab--they had published one of the two back-to-back Nature papers that kicked off the hype in 2000. Surely this was the place to be! But pretty quickly I was confused and puzzled by the lack of any late night bull sessions about the future of synthetic biology, the lack of interest in the stuff that Drew Endy and Tom Knight were doing, and the lack of anyone mentoring newbs in the secrets of the field. People who had done synthetic biology projects seemed to be wrapping up or leaving. (Though I later learned that one guy who almost never talked and worked by himself late at night was doing kickass work--he eventually became an MIT professor.)

I even saw the lab attract another wide-eyed synthetic biology enthusiast--who coincidentally I knew from del.icio.us ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23986789 )--as a junior year intern, assign him a non-synthetic biology project, and then regard him as kind of a flake for being so interested in synthetic bio (he later founded a science related nonprofit that got some press.)

Anyway, it took a while for it to really sink in that the same lab could help kick off the field and yet not be "all in". Turns out the lab was basically a vehicle for its ambitious and very politically savvy PI to branch out into different fields. Which is a fine environment to work in! ...For other, more career-minded people, especially ones who bring their own expertise to the table (as postdocs, etc).