Sunday May 30, 2010
The implications of synthetic life
By Jim Taylor
No sooner had I completed last Sunday’s column, on attempts to extend life by deep-freezing near-death cells, when Craig Venter announced that he had created the first synthetic cells.
From the end of life, to the origins of life.
Venter, of course, is the man whose laboratory won the race to decipher the human genetic code in June 2000.
Now Venter has won another race. He claims to have created synthetic life.
Well, almost. He didn’t quite throw together a witches’ brew of chemicals from which life spontaneously emerged. Rather, he started with something that already had life – a Mycoplasma capricolum bacteria cell – stripped out its DNA, and replaced its DNA with new DNA that he and his colleagues had designed in their computers.
The donor cell – or what was left of it – recognized this new stuff as legitimate DNA, and started replicating, just as it would have before it lost its own DNA.
A landmark in biology
DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid, is the blueprint for life. Its unique double-helix of paired chemical bonds governs every cell of every organism that has ever lived.
As a rough analogy, DNA is like the operating system for my computer. In effect, Venter simply replaced the bacteria’s Windows operating system with a Linux system.
Venter himself implied that analogy. "We were ecstatic when the cells ‘booted up’…" Venter told the Guardian newspaper. "It’s a living species now, part of our planet’s inventory of life."
Geneticist Stephen Scherer of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, hailed Venter’s synthetic DNA, as “a landmark in biology having a similar impact to when Dolly the cloned sheep was introduced to the world.”
“This is a moment in evolution,” gushed the Guardian’s Ken MacLoed, “as radical an invention as agriculture or industry.”
Venter views his achievement as a great breakthrough. It will enable humans to custom-design organisms that will consume greenhouse gases, create fuels, manufacture vaccines…. He didn’t quite suggest they could produce fully marinated T-bone steaks without the inconvenience of raising cattle.
But as one journalist noted, somewhat acidly, “Dr Venter rarely undersells his work: every advance he makes is a breakthrough.”
Opening Pandora’s box
But as you might expect, others see mainly risks and hazards.
Julian Savulescu, professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, said: "Venter … is not merely modifying life by genetic engineering. He is going towards the role of a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally."
The bleakest assessment I’ve seen came from Devinder Sharma of India. Venter, he suggested, “is trying to play God. In fact, God now has competition.
“The day is not far away when we will have a parallel form of life, another living race amidst us.
“The day is also not far away when biological warfare will acquire … more deadly and sinister forms that synthetic life can create.”
Sharma called for government regulation: “We cannot allow science to be left to corporate board rooms.”
So did L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper. The emerging science, it said, "needs to have rules, like anything that touches the heart of life."
And Margaret Somerville, founding director of Montreal’s McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, described molecular biology as "the power to alter 4.8 billion years of evolution…. We desperately need to govern what’s okay to do with this and what’s not okay."
Freed from ancestors
I don’t hold out much hope for legislation. Law always lags behind reality. During the millennia when change moved at glacial speeds, legislation — even if it took a generation to formulate — still had time to influence the unfolding of a new technology.
Not any more. Canada’s copyright law, for example, became law in 1985 – when Internet communication was still largely undreamed of. Even constant amendments leave it constantly playing catch-up.
Legislators cannot write laws for technologies that they have not yet imagined. By the time someone like Venter devises a new technology, it’s already too late to confine it.
"This is the first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer," Venter bragged to reporters — the first organisms since life emerged billions of years ago that have no living ancestor.
Aside from practical implications, I wonder how the creation of synthetic life will affect the way we think about ourselves.
All religions have a creation story. The details differ, but all presume a single, one-time, creation. How will religions deal with parallel creations?
Western Christianity has, by and large, defined nature as sinful. Augustine of Hippo theorized that Adam and Eve’s original sin was transmitted genetically to all generations, and to all of creation. Since sinful beings could not save each other, salvation must come through one considered sinless.
If synthetic bacteria have no ancestors, are they therefore sinless?
Craig Venter himself seems to recognize the broader implications of his work, “both scientifically and philosophically. It certainly changed my views of the definition of life and how life works,” he said.
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Your Turn
This wasn’t a letter, but a comment. I was a guest preacher at a congregation about an hour away, last Sunday. As I paced the parking lot, mentally rehearsing the service to come, a woman accosted me. “Interesting column this morning,” she said. “Right after the service, I’m going to go home and have my head frozen!”
Cliff Boldt wrote, “Cryonics leaves me cold.”
Okay, levity aside, there were some serious comments. For example, I had said that my mother, who died in 1972, would not have known photocopiers. Not so, Lee d’Anjou reminded me. “They were in common use way before that year. I worked for the American Guild of Variety Artists in 1964–1965, and a considerable portion of my job involved photocopying (and filing) minutes from the union locals.”
Lee added, “I know you don’t read science fiction, but Richardson probably did, and Robert Ettinger certainly. Cryonic treatment is several SF’s writers’ quick solution to the way the distance between stars might limit interstellar travel. See, for example, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, and Orson Scott Card plus the scriptwriters of many movies (including Avatar). Asimov and Pohl certainly knew Ettinger’s work (I think it was Pohl who talked his publisher into keeping Ettinger in print), but the idea was certainly around the world of SF well before 1964.”
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About My Books
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Those psalms are still available, even though Rumors is not. They were published in book form by Wood Lake Books in 1994, and republished in 2005. The book is called Everyday Psalms. I have a few copies of my own, but you’re better to contact Wood Lake Books directly. The cover says $19.95 Cdn, $15.95 US, but Wood Lake often has sales.
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