Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms
December 17th, 2007Nothing frightens me more than stories like this. All the rest of it, and I mean ALL the rest of it, is child’s play compared to this.
What can be done to stop this? Anything!?
I know, you’re probably thinking, “Kevin, it can’t be that bad.”
Type genetically engineered Klebsiella into any search engine. If you’re not prepared for what you’re about to read, I suggest wearing a diaper to avoid any unfortunate accidents.
And, no, it’s not that bad. It’s worse.
Via: Washington Post:
It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life’s most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA — an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.
Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.
Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.
In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.
The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.
“This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be,” said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies science’s effects on society. “Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes.”
That unprecedented degree of control over creation raises more than philosophical questions, however. What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make? How will these self-replicating entities be contained? And who might end up owning the patent rights to the basic tools for synthesizing life?
Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core “operating system” for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people’s hands.
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Safety concerns also loom large. Already a few scientists have made viruses from scratch. The pending ability to make bacteria — which, unlike viruses, can live and reproduce in the environment outside of a living body — raises new concerns about contamination, contagion and the potential for mischief.
“Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely accessible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms that could pose grave threats to people and the planet,” concluded a recent report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, one of dozens of advocacy groups that want a ban on releasing synthetic organisms pending wider societal debate and regulation.
“The danger is not just bio-terror but bio-error,” the report says.
Many scientists say the threat has been overblown. Venter notes that his synthetic genomes are spiked with special genes that make the microbes dependent on a rare nutrient not available in nature. And Pierce, of DuPont, says the company’s bugs are too spoiled to survive outdoors.
“They are designed to grow in a cosseted environment with very high food levels,” Pierce said. “You throw this guy out on the ground, he just can’t compete. He’s toast.”
“We’ve heard that before,” said Jim Thomas, ETC Group’s program manager, noting that genes engineered into crops have often found their way into other plants despite assurances to the contrary. “The fact is, you can build viruses, and soon bacteria, from downloaded instructions on the Internet,” Thomas said. “Where’s the governance and oversight?”
In fact, government controls on trade in dangerous microbes do not apply to the bits of DNA that can be used to create them. And while some industry groups have talked about policing the field themselves, the technology is quickly becoming so simple, experts say, that it will not be long before “bio hackers” working in garages will be downloading genetic programs and making them into novel life forms.
“The cat is out of the bag,” said Jay Keasling, chief of synthetic biology at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Nothing frightens me more than stories like this. All the rest of it, and I mean ALL the rest of it, is child’s play compared to this.”
I agree completely. I am a computer programmer, and I know that going into someone else’s code and screwing around before really analyzing the code is both tempting and dangerous. You might initially get the (new) results you want, but, because you didn’t thoroughly understand what the code was doing, you find out days, weeks, or months later that you screwed something up. And there isn’t a computer program on earth that’s as complicated as DNA, and no honest DNA researcher will claim they know how it all works, not by a long shot. And yet here they go, fucking around with what they barely understand, emboldened by their own pride, huge funding, and the fact that they can sometimes achieve what they aimed to do, despite “side effects”, which are already numerous in GMO foods, as just one example. When I read stuff like this, it makes me want the Fall to come, so we might be saved from ourselves before we unleash something so God-forsaken that there’s no hope left at all.
Then there’s the other side of the coin: if science were used to simply discover what’s good in what’s already out there — i.e., IN NATURE, AS IT IS NOW — I’m confident we’d all be able to live long, healthy, strong, cancer-free lives. But that would require us to balance the feminine aspects of ourselves (i.e., by truly revering Nature) with the masculine, something as alien to us, at least in the industrialized world, as thinking in terms of a Mother God right along side our Father God. Anybody hear any mention of “God the Mother” last time you were in church? If you did, you’re in the tiny minority. The rest of us know that all we need is our Father in Heaven, and everything else is just one big bitch to be raped at our discretion.
The Tower of Babel is getting taller every day. We can almost see the Gates of Heaven. What geniuses we are!
You’re right that everything else is child’s play compared with this, with the exception of cognitive AI and nanotech, which make this look like child’s play.
I was a genetics TA, and the field is so broad that it’s often very surprising to learn what can be done. Popular press and thus popular reaction is going to be way behind the current work. You’re very correct that no one has identified all the genes or all their functions and interactions. There are major discoveries in basic taxonomy, behavior/physiology all the time. Our group discovered that the top recreationally caught fish in California is really two cryptic spp which don’t interbreed. Some fishermen knew this, but science didn’t. Vertebrates and plants are discovered all the time.
“with the exception of cognitive AI and nanotech, which make this look like child’s play.”
That stuff isn’t even on the radar for terrifying, compared with this, because meaningful AI and nanotech are always 20 years away.
The engineered organism technology is now.
Yeah. It’s stuff like this that, when I’m not feeling 100%, makes me wonder if the fight’s worth it… But of course, that’s only when I look at the whole game as a fight. I keep telling myself, “adaptation, adaptation, adaptation…”
This is how the world ends?