Synthetic biology has typically been understood as a kind of engineering science in which engineering principles are applied to biology. The engineering orientation of synthetic biology has also received a fair deal of criticism. This paper presents an alternative reading of synthetic biology focusing on the basic science oriented branch of synthetic biology. We discuss the practice of synthetic modeling and how it has made synthetic biologists more aware of some fundamental differences between the functioning of engineered artifacts and biological organisms. As the recent work on the concepts of noise and modularity shows, synthetic biology is in the process of becoming more "biology inspired".