Synthetic Life? Not By a Long
Shot
here it is to expose the hype that scientists have created life but is
cautiously optimistic provided no patents are granted on life, synthetic or
otherwise
The hype
Scientists have created life in the test-tube? The popular media appeared to
have gone into overdrive on the latest episode in the long-running saga of
‘synthetic biology’. The same happened when the human genome sequence was
announced ten years ago as the “book of life”, though it told us absolutely
nothing on how to make life, let
alone a human being.
The media are only slightly exaggerating what the scientists themselves are
claiming. The title of the article published online 20 May 2010 in Science
Express is “Creation [emphasis added] of
a bacterial cell controlled by a
chemically synthesized genome.” It had 24 co-authors including team leader J.
Craig Venter from the J. Craig Venter
Institute based in Rockville, Maryland,
and San Diego, California, in the United States. Venter is the maverick who
famously came up from behind to an ‘equal finish’ with the public consortium in
the race to sequence the entire human
genome. And he is grabbing the headlines
again with the latest stunt.
The hopes and fears
So is this the genesis of the brave new world of synthetic life-forms owned and
controlled by unaccountable corporations hungry
for power and profit that would
make our worst nightmares come true? Or is it the greatest boon to mankind that
will solve all the problems that human folly has created, beginning with
cleaning up the gigantic and still growing oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and
going on to the energy crisis and climate change?
Mark Bedau, a philosopher at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and editor of
the
journal Artificial Life, calls it “a
defining moment in the history of biology
and biotechnology”, while yeast biologist Jef Boeke at John Hopkins University
School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, says it is “an important technical
milestone in the new field of synthetic
genomics” .
Professor Julian Savulescu from the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
at
Oxford University tells the BBC that the
potential of this science is “in
the far future, but real and
significant”, though “the risks are also
unparalleled. We need new standards of
safety evaluation for this kind of
radical research and protections from military
or terrorist misuse and
abuse.These could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons
imaginable. The challenge is to eat the fruit without the worm.”
Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley, says
the experiment will “reconfigure the
ethical imagination”. Kenneth Oye, a
social scientist at the Massachusett s institute of Technology in Cambridge
sums
up: “we are shooting in the dark as
to what the long-term benefits and long-term
risks will be.”
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
