Craig Venter & Co's synthetic/artificial/plagiarized/real life. The politics of Synthia. The bioethics of Synthia. Synthia and evolution and extinction.
[We have an RSS feed. No orange icon, but click here. If that doesn't work, the URL is http://www.nasw.org/rss.xml]
REGARDING SYNTHIA. So, what do we call Synthia, the refurbished bacterium cobbled together from bits and pieces of this and that at the J. Craig Venter Institute, J. Craig Venter, Prop.? This Mycoplasma does seem to be, undeniably, life. But is it artificial life? Synthetic life? Has Venter's team really created life? Or, as Ed Yong puts it at Not Exactly Rocket Science, have they merely plagiarized it?
"Merely" in this case comprised a couple of decades of human brain power, thousands of lab hours, the best years of several researchers' lives, and many millions of bucks. Also many failures, including a mistake in a single base pair that delayed things for 3 months. I thought plagiarism was supposed to be a shortcut.
And don't you love that the new bug contains the DNA equivalent of computer engineers' Easter eggs, the coded names of those working on the project and quoted remarks of the famous, including James Joyce and J. Robert Oppenheimer? Fun to guess what was quoted while awaiting word from the geeks who will decipher and proudly disclose the messages. It would not be a good sign, would it, if one quote was Oppenheimer's epigraph from Hindu scripture, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." (But see below for more on that possibility.) For Joyce, my money is on Molly Bloom's luscious, "yes I said yes I will Yes."
REGARDING THE FUTURE OF SYNTHIA. On a practical commercial note, 80beats asks whether the patents on methods used to produce Synthia filed on behalf of Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics, which underwrote much of the project, will prevent other scientists from using them. The conclusion is a bit hard to make out, or maybe it's that the piece just dribbles off into praising everybody, Venter & Co. for their innovation and patent critics for "questioning the balance of information power so it doesn't all end up in once place." Huh?
At Oscillations, synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis writes:
[T]he synthetic genome still had to be assembled in live yeast cells, incubated with extracts from mycoplasma to process it, and then injected into a living cell to be "booted up." Without life, Synthia wouldn't be alive. What separates a bag of DNA from a living, replicating cell is still unclear and un-synthesizable. To me, life is still "special" and incredibly powerful and I don't think that we have to burst that bubble to be able to engineer cells. I'm a biologist because I think life is awesome. I'm a synthetic biologist because I think it's awesome to be able to see and experience just how robust and powerful biology is as we rewire, remix, and refactor living cells, not because I want life to be just chemicals, just DNA sequence.
I point out this post because it's a snapshot of a scientist grappling, often unsuccessfully, with the potential implications of her extraordinary line of work. She still has a fair amount of grappling ahead of her. So do the rest of us.
Agapakis is probably right that it will be some time before researchers can synthesize many different large DNA sequences leading "to the kinds of large-scale synthetic biology experiments that will let us understand how genes, gene networks, and genomes work inside of a cell." To say nothing of understanding the likely even more complex processes governing how outside environments alter what goes on inside genomes and cells, which she doesn't mention.
But the fact that scientists won't have that ability by a week from Tuesday doesn't mean they won't ever have it. Agapakis goes on:
[D]esigned bacteria growing in controlled environments have been producing useful chemicals for a while now and the technology will certainly get better over the next few years with more advances in synthetic biology. After that, who knows? The possibilities are endless and it's up to all of us to make sure that it's good for everyone.
Yipes. Scientists and a few others have been wringing their hands about genetic engineering's scarier endless possibilities for at least 40 years. A Panglossian declaration that it's up to all of us (who's "us," anyway?) to make sure that it's good for everyone is as far as the discussion has gotten? Yipes and more yipes.
Forget, for the moment, the just plain evil scenarios like creation of new diseases, biowar and bioterror (although, come to think of it, I don't know why we should forget them, even for a moment.) What about reliable old Murphy's Law, the inevitable companion to all human activities? What steps can we take to protect us from ourselves, the few among us who are simply wicked and the rest of us who mean well but are congenitally clumsy? History is not encouraging.
For discussion of these and many other points Synthia's generation has generated, see luminary commentary assembled at Edge's Reality Club. Authors include, among others, George Church, Richard Dawkins, David Dennett, and Freeman Dyson. See in particular Nassim Taleb. And counter Taleb's gloom with a big dose of PZ Myers here and at his own blog, Pharyngula, here and here.
REGARDING THE POLITICS OF SYNTHIA. Fortunately, Congress was on the case immediately — except that the House committee hearing emphasized hopeful talk about synthetic biology's potential for generating biofuels. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, discussed new regs aimed at reducing bioterror risk. Nature's Meredith Wadman reports at The Great Beyond, and Alexis Madrigal does the same at Wired Science.
President Obama was on the case even quicker, asking his new bioethics commission to tackle synthetic biology as its first assignment. At the Bioethics Forum, Eric Parens explains why that assignment may make it hard to stick to Obama's previous charge to the commission to concentrate on practical questions and stay away from big philosophical issues.
CAN SYNTHIA BRING BACK THE DEAD? The farthest-out speculation I've encountered comes from biologist Ursula Goodenough at NPR's 13.7, who neatly conflated Synthia with another genomic development discussed here recently, publication of the Neandertal genome. She observes:
Hence it is now formally feasible, albeit not yet remotely practicable, to synthesize artificial Neanderthal chromosomes, insert copies into enucleated human eggs, and recruit volunteers to give birth to a Homo species that has been extinct for 30,000 years.
Goodenough compares this possibility with genomic resurrection of the extinct dodo, whose DNA has also been extracted from ancient bones. Therefore it might be "formally feasible" — love that term, so much more compelling than "not really feasible at all" — for dodos to be reborn if their DNA was inserted into pigeon eggs. Since humans figured in the dodo's disappearance, she suggests, humans may have an ethical obligation to use technology of the Synthetic sort to resurrect the big bird.
No one knows why the Neandertals are gone, but it's not outgrageous to imagine that — since our co-mingled DNA demonstrates that we co-mingled — humans had a hand in their extinction too. And therefore, she extrapolates, perhaps Homo sapiens sapiens has an ethical obligation to resurrect Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?
