I was asked today about Craig Venter’s momentous achievement in producing the first synthetic organism. My pupil had been reading the papers and was alarmed by what he had read. I suspect he had been reading the Daily Mail but I may be doing him a disservice. (The Mail’s more factual article is much better.)
What Venter and his colleagues have done is build a synthetic genome from scratch, but one that is a copy of an existing bacterium. He then placed this sequence of genes into a different species of bacterium that had had its genes removed. The cell adopted the new genome and started to reproduce. Initially it was relying upon the pre-existing molecules within the host bacterium to enable this process but as the generations increase, less and less of the original cell contents exists and more and more of the chemicals within the cell have the synthetic genome as their source code.
This is a brilliant piece of work because it paves the way for us to develop bacteria that we can exploit to produce proteins that will be beneficial to humans. The scope is vast but initially it is likely to lead to bacterial medicine factories, producing proteins that are of no use to the bacterium but which can be purified and used by humans.
Because the organisms are doing this, it is likely to make them uncompetitive as organisms in the wild. They will need to be housed in artificial environments that match their specific needs because they are expending energy to produce proteins that are of no actual use to them as organisms. Whilst I wholeheartedly support strict regulation and monitoring of this technology, the predictable Luddite response to this breakthrough is deeply depressing. To make a weak analogy, the fact that computer networks can be used to commit fraud on a grand scale should not prevent me from being allowed to use one to write an article (that hardly anyone is going to read!)
Come on world, wake up. This is good science news!
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