Here’s a quick scan of the reaction to Thursday’s news that the Venter Institute has created a synthetic bacterial genome:
+ Some researchers were skeptical of the relative importance of the Venter’s Institute’s achievement, noting that the research team didn’t use the genome to actually run a cell. Said Stony Brook’s Eckard Wimmer to NYT, “No matter how they praise the quality of the synthetic DNA, they have no idea whether it is biologically active.” Added Harvard’s George Church, also in NYT, “Right now, all theyve done is shown they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together.” And in the Washington Post, Church questioned the economics of the Venter Institute’s approach, “The question is: Is it faster or cheaper than other methods? But they don’t lay out their economics. They missed an opportunity there.”
+ Other researchers were more impressed. Harvard Medical School’s Pamela Silver told the Baltimore Sun that the Venter Institute’s work was a “technological tour de force.” And the University of Chicago’s Daphne Preuss described the work as a “seminal achievement” to Chicago Tribune.
+ David Magnus in a Bloomberg News article: “It’s a wonderful breakthrough that could change the way we think about gene therapy. It would allow us potentially to create chromosomes exactly the same as a patient’s chromosome but with genes that have been corrected. This could be a future treatment for disease.”
+ The ethics of synthetic biology came up in a lot of the coverage. “Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world’s longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn’t everything. The important question is not ‘How long?’ but ‘How wise?'” said the ETC Group’s Jim Thomas in a press release. The group also expressed worries about sufficient oversight. In the San Jose Mercury news, David Magnus noted that the field is moving ahead quickly, but “It shouldn’t be discarded because of the pitfalls. We just need to make sure we stay on top of the pitfalls. As a society, we’re taking a gamble that we can put enough protections in place so that by the time it is widespread, the damage can be mitigated.” And in the Chicago Tribune, the Catholic Theological Union’s Rev. Thomas Nairn said the field doesn’t necessarily raise fundamentally new ethical questions: “From a religious point of view the creation of new viruses or bacteria would not necessarily create a huge problem, depending on how they’re used. The two major principles are to do no harm, and do the work respectfully.”
There is a lot we don’t understand about life, of course, but Venter’s project isn’t going to answer all the questions. We are a long way from playing God. The scientists didn’t assemble the fragments of DNA by themselves, nor did they program robots to do so. Instead, they injected the fragments into E. coli, and let the bacteria do the job themselves. Eventually, it turned out that E. coli could only build up a quarter of the genome. The scientists don’t quite know why. So they injected those big chunks of Mycoplasma DNA into yeast. Lo and behold, the yeast were able to finish up the job for the scientists. They don’t quite know how the yeast did their own biochemical magic either. I would assume that God would have this kind of stuff figured out.
Earlier blog.bioethics.net coverage of synthetic biology and Craig Venter.
-Greg Dahlmann