Artificial life being created
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 7:01pm GMT 24/01/2008
Experiments to create the first man-made organism have started in the wake of the successful creation of the genetic code of a living thing from laboratory chemicals.The first artificial genetic code – the software of life – and how to make it from scratch from four kinds of chemical is unveiled today by an American team, marking the completion of the second of three steps towards the dawn of synthetic life.Efforts to finish the final step of transplanting the synthetic DNA into a cell are under way, though it takes some weeks to work out if a transplant has been successful.A team of 17 researchers at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, describes in the journal Science how it has successfully created the largest man-made DNA structure, indeed the largest synthetic molecule, the circular genetic code of an artificial bacterium that it is now trying to breed in the lab.The scientists led by the human genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter want to create new kinds of bacterium, living chemical factories if you like, to make new types of bugs which can be used as green fuels to replace oil and coal, digest toxic waste or absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.The feat will trigger excitement and unease in equal measure along with widespread debate about the ethics of creating new species, which Dr Venter believes will be a major step in the history of our species. One critic of what some call Synthia put it more trenchantly: “God has competition.”Rumours have circulated for weeks that they have achieved the feat but, speaking from Davos, Switzerland, Dr Venter tells The Daily Telegraph: “No we have not. There are a number of serious constraints on that happening and we are working diligently to get rid of them.”If we had succeeded it would be part of this paper. As soon as we have it, I doubt that we would be able to keep it a secret. Nor would we want to.”But he believes success is only “a matter of time.”The genetic codes – genomes – of all organisms are written in the chemical language of DNA and Dr Venter’s team used lab methods to make all 582,970 letters of a slightly modified version of the genome of a genital bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0.The name underlines how Dr Venter wants to rewrite the software of life so it can still run on the hardware of an existing bacterial cell.Standard methods can only make tiny DNA snippets. Today’s technical tour de force, the fruits of an effort launched at the start of 2003, has created a huge ring of DNA that is more than 10 times bigger than earlier attempts, a milestone towards the goal of creating a fully-synthetic organism that is able to self replicate.To achieve today’s “very exciting” milestone, his team made DNA fragments in the lab into larger pieces using new methods for the assembly and reproduction of the DNA segments. After several years of work perfecting chemical assembly, the team found they could harness the process that cells use to repair damage to their chromosomes to complete the job.The team, which now includes Dan Gibson, Clyde Hutchison and the Nobel laureate Ham Smith, has already started its attempt to create a living cell based entirely on the synthetic DNA code as part of an effort to find out which of its genes are essential for life, crucial for efforts to understand how life works.”This extraordinary accomplishment is a technological marvel,” said Dr Venter, paying tribute to his team that has “dedicated the last several years to designing and perfecting new methods and techniques that we believe will become widely used to advance the field of synthetic genomics.”The letters of DNA – chemical building blocks called adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T) – are not easy chemicals to artificially synthesise into chromosomes. As the strands of DNA get longer they get increasingly brittle, making them more difficult to work with.Before today’s publication, the largest synthesised piece of DNA contained only 32,000 letters of code. Ham Smith says: “We have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed.” However, such work would use other kinds of bacteria.Jim Thomas of the ETC group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) called on Dr Venter to slow down so that society could take on board the wider implications.”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?'” says Thomas.”While synthetic biology is speeding ahead in the lab and in the marketplace, societal debate and regulatory oversight is stalled and there has been no meaningful or inclusive discussion on how to govern synthetic biology in a safe and just way. In the absence of democratic oversight profiteering industrialists are tinkering with the building blocks of life for their own private gain. We regard that as unacceptable.”Rev Thomas Nairn, professor of Catholic ethics at the Catholic Theological Union, tells the Chicago Tribune: “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.” Prof George Church, a Harvard Medical School geneticist leading a rival effort, says the Science paper “is not a test of vitalism. It’s an assembly paper.”Right now, all they’ve done is shown they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together,” he says, adding the real question is whether it is faster or cheaper than alternative ways to engineer useful organism: “They don’t lay out their economics. They missed an opportunity.”Prof Eckard Wimmer, State University of New York, Stony Brook, who led an effort to construct synthetic polio, comments: “The ultimate step is proving what they have synthesised is biologically active.””Unfortunately, this very critical point is missing here,” he says, adding that he was left with “the unpleasant feeling whether or not the synthetic DNA was indeed proper and able for biological function.”But the work of Venter’s team is a “seminal achievement,” says Prof Daphne Preuss at the University of Chicago and Chromatin Inc, a biotech firm that is studying ways of synthesising small chromosomes for plants.The work represents a “technological tour de force,” adds Prof Pamela Silver, at Harvard Medical School.And Eddy Rubin, director of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, California, says of the overall goal to engineer more useful forms of life: “I think it’s one of the important steps that have to be achieved.”
