Synthetic biology is the engineering view on biotechnology that ultimately aims at fulfilling the quest of building an artificial cell. From the very first attempts of synthesizing life, this subject has made an impact on the media through, very often, misleading headlines and news. We review here the historical journalistic approach on synthetic biology and related disciplines, from the early twentieth century to the lastest achievements on designing protocells or genome reduction. However, it would be very naive to consider the research community and the media to be unidirectionally linked, with the latter being mere displayers (and disrupters) of the research “reality”. On the contrary, the research community has also received a strong influence from the media, as evidenced by statements from researchers, common metaphors and, even, a trend to unconsciously develop shared techno-social paradigms. We conclude that, beyond overstatements from researchers and journalists’ misunderstandings, both communities provide strong feedback to each other and, together, contribute to define the dream that synthetic biologists are aiming for.

合成生物学是生物技术的工程学观点，其最终目标是实现构建人造细胞的任务。从第一次尝试合成生活开始，这个主题就经常通过误导性的标题和新闻对媒体产生影响。我们在这里回顾了合成生物学和相关学科的历史新闻报道方法，从二十世纪初到设计原始细胞或基因组缩减的最新成就。然而，如果认为研究界和媒体是单向联系的，那就太天真了，因为后者只是研究“现实”的展示者（和破坏者）。相反，研究界也受到了媒体的强烈影响，研究人员的声明、常见的隐喻，甚至无意识地发展共享技术社会范式的趋势都证明了这一点。我们的结论是，除了研究人员和记者的误解造成的夸大之外，两个社区都互相提供了强有力的反馈，并共同为定义合成生物学家所追求的梦想做出了贡献。