April 25, 2024

Craig Venter’s synthetic bacteria

Michael Cook

first synthetic cell created

It was described as a scientific
earthquake, but Craig
Venter was just a fraction more modest in summing up his team’s biotechnology
milestone in May. His synthetic bacterium was, he said,
“the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a
computer.”

It certainly was an impressive feat of
technology. As they reported in the journal Science, researchers from the J
Craig Venter Institute painstakingly assembled the genome of one species of bacterium
and inserted it into another cell. The constructed cell began to function,
dividing and growing like a natural cell.   

Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, as Venter
has dubbed the synthetic organism, is another step toward the creation of life-forms
tailor-made for industry. Now that his scientists can “routinely write the
software of life”, he hopes to create new biological products for synthesising
fuels, cleaning water, discovering new vaccines and medicines and so on. Commercially, synthetic
biology could be the next big thing after IT and the internet.

The company’s ultimate goal is to create a
stripped-down cellular chassis with just enough biological machinery for
independent life. Non-essential DNA regions from the synthetic genome will be
whittled away until it is as concise as possible to sustain life. The
result will be “a new vision of cells as understandable machines comprised
of biological parts of known function”.

Some bioethicists interpreted this
ambitious vision as a “God is dead” moment. Julian
Savulescu, of Oxford University, declared breathlessly that Venter
was becoming “a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed
naturally, creating life from the ground up using basic building blocks.” And
the best-known bioethicist in the US, Arthur Caplan,
ranked it with Darwin and Copernicus. “Venter’s achievement would seem to
extinguish the argument that life requires a special force or power to exist,”
he said. “In my view, this makes it one of the most important scientific
achievements in the history of mankind.”

However, a survey of the media suggested
that more non-scientists than scientists were popping champagne corks. The
closer to the lab bench, the more sceptical the comments. Although Venter is an
accomplished scientist who shared the honours for the first human genome sequence,
his colleagues describe him as a shrewd self-publicist and brilliant
entrepreneur who likes to frame solid achievements as historic breakthroughs.

So it was an impressive technological feat,
but not a major scientific advance, according to many biologists. Harvard’s
George Church told Nature
that “The semi-synthetic mycobacterium is not changed from the wild state in
any fundamental sense. Printing out a copy of an ancient text isn’t the same as
understanding the language.” And Martin Fussenegger, of ETH Zurich, in
Switzerland, said that “Since appearing on the planet, mankind has rarely
created something new. Instead, people help themselves to materials that are
already present, and produce increasingly complex devices. This latest
technology will simply increase the speed with which new organisms can be
generated.”

What about the ethical implications? Venter
knows that his ambitious plans would be controversial and he has been preparing
a soft landing for his high-flying projects for years. A report — which he
supported — came last year from The Hastings Center, in New York. It envisaged
two types of potential harms emerging from synthetic biology.

First are the physical harms of bioerror
and bioterror. Environmentalists are worried that new bugs might escape from
laboratories and destroy ecologies. Security experts fear that terrorists could
create microbes to spread lethal diseases. But in a sense these risks are
easily handled because there is abundant experience of how to fireproof and
regulate dangerous technologies. Venter’s company says that safeguards are
already in place. The microorganisms will be engineered so that they cannot
live outside the lab or other production environments. If they happen to escape,
“suicide genes” will be activated. Even so, there is bound to be a fierce debate
over whether government regulation is needed or whether just a voluntary synthetic
biology code of ethics will suffice.

Less easy to deal with will be the
non-physical harms — the fears of Frankenstein technologies, deranging the
natural order and scientists “playing God”. There are scientists and
bioethicists who dismiss such concerns as atavistic religious prejudice or
irrational hysteria. But The Hastings Center disagreed: “Many critics concerned
about this second class of non-physical harms are rational and profess no
religion at all.”

In fact, two German bioethicists pointed
out a couple of years ago in the journal Nature Biotechnology that if we
begin to create lower forms of life and to think of them as mere building
blocks or “artifacts”, then we “may in the (very) long run lead to a weakening
of society’s respect for higher forms of life.” There is a serious danger that our
hard-won respect for animal life and even human life would eventually be
undermined.

Reactions like Savulescu’s and Caplan’s suggest
that some
scientists and bioethicists do think that the construction of an artificial
genome has confirmed that that all life forms, not just Mycoplasma mycoides, are
only “complex chemical devices”. Venter’s announcement may or may not be the opening
salvo of a scientific revolution. It certainly opens a new chapter in the drama
of whether man is the master or the servant of technology.



Michael Cook
synthetic biology

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