Synthesizing Life?

For most of recorded history, God was the only one who created life.

Although I’m largely a huge fan of Craig Venter‘s work and approach to science (he is the guy who won the race to code the human genome), his new project creeps me out.  He and his colleagues are setting out to conquor the next great genetics challenge, synthesizing life from scratch. The technology is largely in place, and they have now succeeded in their primary efforts.  The team chose an ‘easy’ target for their first attempts, trying to create a simple bacteria called mycoplasma genitalium. It worked. Technically, it is not alive, as it lacks the biological machinery of a cell.  However, the genome is basically all there.

The good news is that by doing this, they will be able to probe a ton of very fundamental questions about the functioning of different parts of the genome directly. This type of work will help to really move our understanding of genetics into the 21st century.  The implications of the work are huge for pharma, biotech, and others who can use this info to build better drugs, and solve medical mysteries. Still, they are basically creating frankenstein. The logical extension of this work is to move to more complex organisms.  Where will that lead?  Design-your-own pet / friend / child / husband laboratories?  Hmmm.  Science is moving ahead at full steam.  I’m not sure the world is ready.

Creepy fact # 1: To make sure that their frankenstein did not escape captivity from their lab, Venter and company made it dependent on an antibiotic so that if it escaped it could not survive. The fact that they were worried about this worries me.  What would happen if it was let loose to run around with God’s other creatures?

Creepy fact # 2: To make sure that frankenstein was clearly identifiable to anyone through a genetic test, the scientists wrote the name of their institute and their individual names into its DNA code. Creepy!