Abstract: The decade of 1990s was spent in reading DNA. The decade of 2000 was spent in writing DNA. To enable this paradigm shift in biology, new technologies emerged, enormous data were generated and the sciences of systems and synthetic biology were born. Questions that were historically qualitative became quantitative in nature. People used mathematical and computational solutions to fit into biological problems. In 2006, an engineering inspired approach formally took off from MIT, churning a number of innovations towards designing novel organisms. For the last two decades, the intellectual front end in biology has rapidly moved towards computation and engineering. In my talk I will trace the emergence of new approaches in biology, draw parallels between engineering and biology, describe our work and hint towards future developments in the field. I will argue that biology is fast becoming a computational problem . Whether biology can become an engineering discipline - that is still an open issue.