Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [65]
What is interesting is that no one expressed shock or outrage. Scientists, particularly those who work with Venter, have come to expect such anarchy. After all, this is a man who can quite justifiably be accused of playing God.
‘This is the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.’ Those were the words, spoken by Venter at a press conference on 20 May 2010, that sent the President of the United States of America into a barely concealed state of panic. Venter’s science raised ‘genuine concerns’, Barack Obama said. Within a few hours of Venter’s announcement, the President had initiated a study to look into its implications.
What Venter had done was certainly extraordinary. If the announcement had come on a videotape from Osama bin Laden, it would have triggered widespread alarm. Venter’s research team had created the world’s first self-replicating synthetic genome. The design came from a computer, and the genome was created from chemicals stored in glass bottles. Once assembled and placed inside a scooped-out bacterial cell, the instructions of this genome were carried out to the letter. The cell split and reproduced itself – the split-off cell contained another copy of the artificial genome – and carried on its life as if it had been on Earth for millions of years, rather than just a few days.
Venter’s aim is not to strike terror into the hearts of humanity. He hopes that this synthetic cell – named Synthia – will be the first of many diverse artificially produced bacteria that become the new chemical factories. The DNA instructions inside many naturally occurring bacteria cause them to produce a range of chemicals. Biochemists have already learned how to turn this ability to our advantage by engineering bacteria that produce human insulin, for example. Venter wants to develop bacteria that can produce synthetic petrol, or process the excess carbon dioxide that is contributing to global warming. These bacteria are meant to save the world.
Not that Venter is working at quite that level yet. The synthetic genome he created was just a copy of the genome of an existing bacterium. The natural Mycoplasma mycoides bacterium that lives in cows and goats is almost identical to the synthetic Mycoplasma mycoides that Venter’s team made. The only difference was that Venter’s team had inserted a few ‘watermarks’ into the genome. Using the chemicals of DNA, they wrote a web address and a few famous quotations in the space after the naturally occurring genetic information. There was a quote from the late Caltech physicist Richard Feynman: ‘What I cannot build I cannot understand.’ James Joyce made it in there too: ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.’ The web address was for the use of anyone who managed to decode this information. One can only assume that there is a prize for the first to show up having cracked the code.
It’s a playful touch, which is perhaps why many of Venter’s competitors have accused him of hype and gimmickry. Yes, Venter had built a genome from chemicals, they said, but he had to insert it into an existing bacterium. ‘He has not created life, only mimicked it,’ Nobel laureate David Baltimore told the New York Times. The work is ‘an important advance in our ability to re-engineer organisms’, said biomedical engineer Jim Collins in Nature, but ‘it does not represent the making of new life from scratch’.
The philosophers and ethicists were more alarmed. According to philosopher Mark Bedau, it was ‘a defining moment in the history of biology and biotechnology