“We won’t really understand the genome until we can build it up from scratch,” said Dr. Matthew Porteus, a cancer researcher and gene-editing expert from Stanford University who spoke on a panel at last Tuesday’s meeting, which took place at Harvard Medical School.

The genome contains the instructions for life. And while scientists can decipher the complete sequence of DNA that makes up a human genome, trying to build the 3 billion nucleotides letter by letter would be a test of how much we know about it.

“Moving beyond reading DNA to writing DNA is a natural next step,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told STAT in an email.

Pamela Silver, a Harvard bioengineer who was invited to but did not attend last Tuesday’s meeting, said that taking the genome apart (with new gene-editing techniques like CRISPR) and putting it together (through synthesis) are “complementary” methods: “No one is better than the other.”