On the plus side, it would represent a new level of understanding of life, and it would provide scientists with a system to build on to explore some of life's underlying principles. On the minus side, as with any new scientific frontier, many will worry that there are grave risks to safety, or about the ethical implications (i.e., "playing God").
Conspiracy theories abound on nearly any subject, of course, but I'm not here to provide one. Mostly I want to start a discussion of the topic, because the ubiquitous concerns to be raised look like this:
Before these claims go forward, society must consider their far-reaching social, ethical and environmental impacts, and have an informed debate about whether they are socially acceptable or desirable.
OK, good. Let's do that, then.
First of all, some background. I do bacterial genetic engineering. I have no financial interest whatsoever in the Venter Institute, and I don't know anyone who works there. I do think the project is enormously interesting, and I also believe that there is no particular cause for alarm.
Let's look at what we're talking about here. What these scientists want to do is make this minimal set of genes from scratch, assemble them into a chromosome, put that into a bacterial cell with the DNA taken out, and hope the resulting construct can grow and replicate, even for a while. The genes already exist in nature, so in a sense, there's nothing new here. The difference is that this minimal combination does not exist in nature, because life did not evolve in a flask full of lovely nutrients. Bugs in "real life" have it much harder, and they have thus retained much more than the minimal genome to ensure their survival.
Which brings me to my first point: a synthetic organism like this would be an absolute pansy in the wild, and it would be overrun very quickly by naturally occurring organisms. They'd literally eat it for lunch. If this bug ever got released into the wild, it would not live to tell the tale. No, growing this thing would require a complete set of nutrients, and most likely any slight disturbance in that would cause its rapid demise. No one would ever use it in an industrial process, because it would be far too delicate. You can't throw a bunch of disparate genes together with no coherent regulation strategy and expect the resulting bug to be anything but an absolute klunker.
Of course, there are other obvious knee-jerk worries:
Perhaps the most serious issue is publishing details of building microbes that terrorists might use to design deadly pathogens.
The serious problem with this argument is that that technology already exists, and has for a long time. First of all, there are lots of potent, culturable pathogens in nature already. You don't really need to construct anything. But if you wanted to go down that road, I guarantee you that with some basic lab equipment (well, at least a few hundred thousand dollars' worth), it would be relatively easy to engineer a bacterium, say, that produced lots of anthrax toxin. All you'd need is an existing organism you can grow easily and a synthetic toxin gene. If there's no regularly checked record of the gene sequences you make, which is undoubtedly the case for the vast majority of gene synthesizer machines, especially at universities, nobody would even know. You could just do it in your spare time while you worked on other projects. The thing that would worry me a lot more than the ability to construct the bug would be rendering it into weapon form without killing myself in the process. That's a whole different ballgame, and you're far less likely to succeed undetected in that endeavor. You could also rather easily develop a pathogen that was resistant to multiple antibiotics, but the same weaponry problem would exist for you. Mind you, the possession of a minimal organism would be of no help whatsoever to you in any of this. In fact, it is probably just about dead last on the list of organisms you'd select. You'd have no idea, first of all, how to get new DNA into it, or whether that was even possible. Couldn't you just synthesize a new genome with the toxin in it, though? I guess, but why on earth would you do that when it would cost far more than using conventional techniques? And when you'd end up with a totally lame bacterium that you'd be very lucky to even be able to grow?
As for ethical implications, I think we can save these for the future. No one is going to be synthesizing humans, or even flies, from scratch any time soon. The only question left is whether there's something wrong about taking a set of genes that already exist in nature and reassembling them, something genetic engineers essentially already do on a regular basis anyway. The thrust of my argument here is that this is actually not as new as it seems.
One other concern that's been raised is about patenting a living organism. But it's no different from what already occurs. If you synthesize by any exisitng means a novel organism, that is, one that doesn't occur in nature but provides some function not attainable with naturally occurring organisms, you can get a patent. Happens all the time. But you don't really "own" the organism. You are merely the only one who can generate revenue using it, and you can only have that exclusivity for a limited time, after which anyone can use it, because you're required to tell them exactly how, or you don't get a patent in the first place. The minimal organism in particular, in my view, does not present much utility beyond a reasearch tool and the coolness of having "synthesized" an organism. I would not want to try to use it in an industrial process unless I was interested in a slow, delicate, and basically permanently sick bug.
But all this is only my two cents – or maybe 50 cents, because I've gone on for a while. But I'd be interested in any other views, because hey, that's why we're here!
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