Not since the race to put the first satellite in orbit ( The Soviets won that one 50 years ago exactly in Oct 1957 with Sputnik --the brain child of Ukrainian scientist Serhii Korol'ov ) and the race to put a man on the moon, won by NASA , has there been so much excitement in the scientific community. For those of you who haven't been following this story, we seem to be on the brink of the creation of the first artificial life form on earth…. humans playing God from down on earth with synthetic biology or what I like to call Genesis 2.0
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See previous post in June 2007 Artificial Synthetic Life-Genesis 2.0 one step closer? 07-212.
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There seem to be two tactical approaches to synthetic biology.
The top down approach (strip & test method ) is being used by Dr Craig Venter's US team which started working with one of the simplest cellular life forms - the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, which causes urinary tract infections. By individually stripping away each of its 482 genes and observing the effect on the organism Venter’s team calculated that a core group of only 381 genes are vital for life ie. for a cell to function and reproduce. Earlier this year, they applied to patent the discovery- essentially the basic bacteria chassis on/in which to create life. Venter was quoted on the weekend saying: "It's not like baking a cake, mixing all the ingredients and putting it in the oven, and hey presto, there's new life," he says. "We're not creating life, we are creating new life forms from existing ones." They hope to use this chassis or platform to create (on the positve side) artificial bacteria to produce sustainable energy (hydrogen or gasoline or convert hydrogen and CO2 into methane), attack climate change ( scrub out CO2) or as a carrier for new drugs against cancer and other diseases. or in a "darker world" scenrio-bioweapons of mass distruction.
A similar designer, engineering approach was used by scientist at LS9 to engineer e. coli bacteria to make gasoline (see here)
Using a reverse tactic, Dr Murtas, at the Enrico Fermi research centre at Roma Tre University in Italy, and Pier Luigi Luisi are aiming to design and build a artificial live form from the bottom up. This bottom-up approach has the possibility of creating living systems from entirely non-living materials from the laboratory
The Guardian newspaper today jumped the gun, announcing that Venter is on the verge of a world- shattering announcement-that they have managed to engineer the first artificial life form. See “Gene genie” and “I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer”
The Guardian writes:
Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be "a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before".
The Guardian can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code."
[...]
Pat Mooney, director of a Canadian bioethics organization, ETC group, said the move was an enormous challenge to society to debate the risks involved. "Governments, and society in general, is way behind the ball. This is a wake-up call - what does it mean to create new life forms in a test-tube?"
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