The bio-revolution

Geneticist and entrepreneur Dr Craig Venter hit the headlines in May 2010 after creating the first example of synthetic life. Leila Sattary asks whether scientists are playing God and weighs up the pros and cons of this bio-revolution

In 2001, Dr Craig Venter was the first to sequence the complete 6 billion letter human genome, his own DNA sequence, and this year he created the first synthetic life forms. For the first time, researchers were able to copy an existing bacterial genome by synthesising it to chemically create a copy. He is not merely copying life artificially, or modifying it through genetic engineering, but creating artificial life from scratch that never would have existed naturally. One thing is certain, the creation of synthetic life, announced in May 2010 in the journal Science, has aroused awe and aversion across the globe.

This paradigm shift could herald a revolution in genetics opening up a new world of solutions to challenges in healthcare and the environment. However, with great science comes great responsibility – could this new science be a potential threat to our society? And more importantly, can we understand the deep significance of humans creating life from bottles of chemicals and a chemical synthesiser?

The synthetic life that Dr Venter has created is certainly a step change in genetics. However, some have argued that his work is not truly the creation of artificial life. Although they did painstakingly stitch together a synthetic genome from chemically synthesised pieces of DNA, it was then inserted into an existing living cell. The cell is described as ‘synthetic’ because it is controlled only by the synthetic genome, even though the recipient cell is not synthetic. The science itself is fascinating. The single-celled organism is marked with four ‘watermarks’ encoded in the DNA to identify it and trace its descendants. The watermarks include a code table for the alphabet with punctuation to allow others to leave messages, the names of the contributing scientists, three quotations and the web address for the cell.

Dr Venter is an entrepreneur as well as a scientist. He is seeking to patent the synthetic life technology and already has significant funding from biofuel companies to develop the technology to address climate change. The first application of synthetic life could be to develop new flu vaccines. Had this technology had been available last year, a vaccine for Swine Flu could have been created in a day. Healthcare is just the tip of the iceberg - the potential applications of synthetic life are wide ranging. Dr Venter’s group are already working on designing algae that can capture carbon dioxide and devising chemicals to clean water.

We are still a long way from creating artificial intelligence in the form of animals or humans from bottles of chemicals but this new research certainly takes us one step closer. Genetics is a highly sensitive area when it comes to the public – scientists need to prepare themselves and their public to address the ethics relating to artificial intelligence.

Venter’s work is so significant that it has been compared to splitting the atom and will probably win him in the Noble Prize. However, are there more parallels between synthetic life and splitting the atom than just scientific importance? Will the quest to understand fundamental science once again, inadvertently, create new weapons, this time biological rather than nuclear?

Venter himself acknowledges that the technology could be used for harm, for example creating germs for bioterrorism. New standards of safety need to be implemented to protect from military or terrorist misuse. However, it is hard to create new regulation when it is unclear what are the real risks and when the technology is so much in the public eye, encroaches on morals.

Beneath all the science and stigma lies the philosophical implication of actually creating life. Venter’s achievement seems to extinguish the argument that life requires some special force to exist – life is just a complicated arrangement of atoms that can be recreated with the right chemicals and a big synthesiser. Action groups are quick to lay blame with the scientists claiming that their ambition for total control of nature is ‘playing God’ and ruffling their deep seated beliefs. Some have called Venter ‘God 2.0’, a version update on the original. Perhaps an ethical storm is brewing, but we got past cloning and almost past stem cells without any complete disasters, scientifically or morally. Synthetic life will undoubtedly create innovative solutions for today’s problems but is could also be the first step in a new era of biology beyond what we can currently imagine.