Look around you. Engineers have designed and created most of the advanced technologies and complex devices around us today. However, no engineer has yet been able to come close in either the design or creation of a system that rivals the intricacies and complexities of biological systems. Even the simplest living biological systems, single cellular microbes, accomplish tasks that are not even imaginable to the current engineer.
Understanding and harnessing the power of biological systems is a major engineering challenge. The first step is to reverse engineer the innards of simple microbial systems. But we will not know we have completely understood the system until we can forward engineer synthetic organisms and create artificial life. This is undoubtedly a difficult endeavor and brings many moral, ethical, and practical implications. There are many questions that need to be asked and not many easy answers. In the process of studying Nature, we hope to learn much about engineering complexity and, perhaps, even understand this thing we call life.