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That brave new world keeps looking braver and nearer. Looking to treat biology like another kind of manufacturing, scientists are hoping to create living organisms that can do almost anything from solving our energy problems to curing cancer:
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Not all scientists agree that SynBio will work. (A minority that holds strong religious beliefs voices the greatest skepticism.) Francis Collins, the director of the American portion of the Human Genome Project, is a bitter opponent of Venter's free-wheeling approach to biotechnology (the two men were forced to accept equal credit for completing the human-genome sequence on the White House lawn with Bill Clinton). "I find it very hard to believe that, starting from scratch, we can somehow come up with a better [biological] system—one that's going to have much success," he said in an interview with Nova. Leon Kass, former chairman of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, thinks SynBio will fail at a more basic level. Scientists, he says, are "inherently incapable of understanding life as lived—not only by human beings, but by any living thing."
Like most biologists, SynBio practitioners have a more materialist view of life. "Life is not magic," says Princeton's Ron Weiss, an electrical engineer who now concentrates on genetic programming of cells. He thinks older biologists like Kass have not kept up with advances in science. Of course, SynBio scientists haven't quite proven that a cell is a kind of biochemical machine, and religious biologists like Kass and Collins hang on tightly to this uncertainty. Proof will come when the first discrete, self-maintaining, self-replicating, stable organic creature—Life 2.0—is created from scratch in the lab.
Proof won't deter criticism from outside the scientific community. The idea that only God can create life is arguably even more fundamental to Judeo-Christian dogma than the 17th-century notion that Earth was at the center of the universe. Pope Benedict XVI has expressed outrage at scientists who "modify the very grammar of life as planned and willed by God." The pope elaborated in an address in 2006: "To take God's place, without being God, is insane arrogance, a risky and dangerous venture." Green activists echo this disdain. "Synthetic biology is like genetic engineering on steroids," warns Greenpeace representative Doreen Stabinsky.
Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds. Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature's creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do—be it animals that see, hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed on the sun's rays, exuding bright floral colors to attract pollinators. SynBio proponents are taking a new tack, and they're not afraid of the implications. As James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA structure, says: "If we don't play God, who will?"
-- Lee Silver for Newsweek
(Source: Lee Silver for Newsweek)
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That brave new world keeps looking braver and nearer. Looking to treat biology like another kind of manufacturing, scientists are hoping to create living organisms that can do almost anything from solving our energy problems to curing cancer:
Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They've forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.Naturally, there is controversy over the religious implications, over and beyond whether this new science will even succeed, about the sacredness of life and people playing God. All that good stuff. The excerpt containing that discussion is below.
... Despite the opposition, the researchers who work in the field, which is known as Synthetic Biology, have a disarming casualness about their work—almost as though they were building machines, rather than living things.
___ ___ ___
Not all scientists agree that SynBio will work. (A minority that holds strong religious beliefs voices the greatest skepticism.) Francis Collins, the director of the American portion of the Human Genome Project, is a bitter opponent of Venter's free-wheeling approach to biotechnology (the two men were forced to accept equal credit for completing the human-genome sequence on the White House lawn with Bill Clinton). "I find it very hard to believe that, starting from scratch, we can somehow come up with a better [biological] system—one that's going to have much success," he said in an interview with Nova. Leon Kass, former chairman of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, thinks SynBio will fail at a more basic level. Scientists, he says, are "inherently incapable of understanding life as lived—not only by human beings, but by any living thing."
Like most biologists, SynBio practitioners have a more materialist view of life. "Life is not magic," says Princeton's Ron Weiss, an electrical engineer who now concentrates on genetic programming of cells. He thinks older biologists like Kass have not kept up with advances in science. Of course, SynBio scientists haven't quite proven that a cell is a kind of biochemical machine, and religious biologists like Kass and Collins hang on tightly to this uncertainty. Proof will come when the first discrete, self-maintaining, self-replicating, stable organic creature—Life 2.0—is created from scratch in the lab.
Proof won't deter criticism from outside the scientific community. The idea that only God can create life is arguably even more fundamental to Judeo-Christian dogma than the 17th-century notion that Earth was at the center of the universe. Pope Benedict XVI has expressed outrage at scientists who "modify the very grammar of life as planned and willed by God." The pope elaborated in an address in 2006: "To take God's place, without being God, is insane arrogance, a risky and dangerous venture." Green activists echo this disdain. "Synthetic biology is like genetic engineering on steroids," warns Greenpeace representative Doreen Stabinsky.
Behind much of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds. Charles Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature's creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do—be it animals that see, hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed on the sun's rays, exuding bright floral colors to attract pollinators. SynBio proponents are taking a new tack, and they're not afraid of the implications. As James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA structure, says: "If we don't play God, who will?"
-- Lee Silver for Newsweek
(Source: Lee Silver for Newsweek)
