• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Church and Libchaber are only just starting to figure out how to use parts of E. coli to create new life-forms. They cannot just throw together DNA and some other molecules and let them come to life on their own. Life is not like a computer, which simply boots up at the press of a button. Every E. coli alive today emerged from an ancestor, which emerged from ancestors of its own. Together they form an unbroken river of biology that has flowed continuously for billions of years. Life as we know it has always been part of that river. Perhaps now we will make a canal of our own.

RETURN OF FRANKENSTEIN’S MICROBE

In May 2006, synthetic biologists met in Berkeley, California, for their second international meeting. Along with the standard research talks, they set aside time to draft a code of conduct. The day before, thirty-five organizations—representing, among others, environmentalists, social activists, and biological warfare experts—released an open letter urging that the biologists withdraw the code. They should join a public debate about synthetic biology instead and be ready to submit to government regulations. “Biotech has already ignited worldwide protests, but synthetic biology is like genetic engineering on steroids,” said Doreen Stabinsky of Greenpeace International.

These days, biotechnology is experiencing an intense case of déjà vu. The questions people are debating about synthetic biology are strikingly similar to the ones that came up when genetically engineered E. coli made news in the 1970s. Do the benefits justify the risks? Is there any intrinsic wrong in tinkering with life? The new debate is far more complex than the old one, in part because E. coli is not the only thing scientists are manipulating. Now we must consider transgenic crops, engineered stem cells, human-animal chimeras. The new debate often turns on subtle points of medicine, conservation biology, patent law, and international trade. But for all the differences, the parallels are still powerful and instructive. To understand the potential risks and benefits of the new biotechnology, it helps to look back at the fate of genetically engineered E. coli over the past three decades.

The dire warnings that E. coli would create tumor plagues and insulin shock epidemics seem quaint today. In thirty years no documented harm from genetically engineered E. coli has emerged, despite the fact that many factories breed the bacteria in 40,000-liter fermenters in which every milliliter contains a billion E. coli. No one has a God’s-eye view of the fate of every engineered E. coli in the past thirty years, so it’s impossible to know for sure why the predicted plagues never came. Some clues have come from experiments. Scientists put E. coli K-12 carrying human genes in tubs of sludge and tanks of water and animal guts. They found that the bacteria rapidly disappeared. Genetically engineered E. coli channel a lot of energy and raw materials into making the proteins from inserted genes. But those proteins, such as insulin and blood thinners, probably don’t boost E. coli’s growth or odds of surviving in the wild. In the carefully controlled conditions scientists create in laboratories, they can thrive. But pitted against other bacteria, they fail.

Genetic engineers did not introduce genes to E. coli from other species for the first time. In a sense, E. coli and its ancestors have been genetically engineered for billions of years. But most of the transfers have been complete failures. Bacteria cannot make proteins from many horizontally transferred genes, and natural selection favors mutations that strip most alien genes from their genomes.

Unfortunately, the absence of evidence is not a slam-dunk case for the evidence of absence. If an engineered strain of E. coli escapes from a factory and manages to survive in the outside world for a few days, it may be able to pass its genes to other bacteria. If a soil microbe picks up a gene for human insulin or some other alien protein, it probably would not benefit