8/6/2019 The Quantum Tunnel Vol 1 No 2

1/2

The Quantum TunnelScience and the World around Us Volume 1, Number 2, May, 8 2011

Synthetic LifeThis article first appeared in the September 2010 is-

sue of The Next Door Magazine

David S. Latchman

The recent announcement of the creation of a syn-thetic life-form by scientists at the J. Craig VenterInstitute is likely to conjure images straight out ofa Hollywood B-movie. A few chemicals are mixedinto a beaker, the concoction is zapped with elec-tricity and a few hours later, a cascade of reactions

take place and a new life-form crawls out of solutionto wreck havoc on an unsuspecting world. (Throwin mad-scientist laughing manically while shouting,Its alive!)

As exciting (or horrifying) as this sounds, this sce-nario is far removed from what the field of syntheticbiology represents. Scientists are not attempting tocreate life out of inanimate matter (at least, not yet) but rather modify existing organisms, like geneticengineers already do today. But instead of target-ing and replacing one gene, large chunks of genes

or entire genomes are changed. The difference be-tween this and genetic engineering is that syntheticbiologists are constructing the instruction sets for lifefrom scratch and adding it to something that is al-ready alive. The possibilities of this are endless asthe changes in an organisms DNA can force themto do things typically not found in nature, such as,the production of fuels and chemicals from carbondioxide in the air to the manufacture of medicines.Organisms can even be designed to seek and destroymalignant cells and hopefully cure diseases.

The Minimal Genome Project and

Creating Synthetic Organisms

But what is remarkable about this recent achieve-ment isnt the genetic sequencing or the chemicalsynthesis of a bacterial cell that took place but howfar the field has come in a relatively short space oftime. The techniques to sequence DNA was firstdeveloped in the late 1970s by Frederick Sanger tomap the genome of a bacterium phi-X174, the firstorganism to be sequenced. This technique that waspainstakingly done entirely by hand and played animportant part in the Human Genome Project. To-

day, computers are used to sequence data and theability to digitize genomic information has increasedby more than eight orders of magnitude in the past25 years; a feat only surpassed by the semiconductorindustry.

The Venter Labs interest in synthesizing largeDNA molecules and chromosomes grew out of theirefforts over the past 15 years from the the MinimalGenome Project. This project sought to discover anddefine the minimal set of instructions or genes that isneeded for an organism to survive. In any organismthere are large sets of genes that are non-coding; they

do not encode proteins needed for life. Theoretically,these can be eliminated from an organism with nodetrimental effect. This work was started with the se-quencing of the Mycoplasma genitalium bacterium,an organism with the smallest complement of genesand the organism the group chose to synthesize.

The group then developed strategies to not onlyproduce large DNA sequences from yeast cells butto also assemble them in the correct order. Oncefully assembled, the genome can be inserted into analready existing cell that has had its genetic mate-

Newsletter Contents:

Synthetic Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

http://www.nextdoormagazine.com/http://www.nextdoormagazine.com/

8/6/2019 The Quantum Tunnel Vol 1 No 2

2/2

The Quantum Tunnel Newsletter Vol. 1, May, 8 2011

rial removed. Certain genetic markers were addedto distinguish the laboratory created specimens fromtheir wild cousins, genes that would be transferred

to daughter cells and can be identified in any test.This process is nothing like the creation of a life-

form but rather the modification of. It is akin to wip-ing the hard-drive of your computer to install yourown operating system. The cell is the computer sys-tem that runs the instruction set that is encoded inthe synthesized genome.

The Promise, Threats and Implica-

tions of Synthetic Biology

Today, very few of us can imagine a life withoutsemi-conductors. But the manner in which semicon-ductors has transformed our lives and society willprobably pale in comparison to what synthetic biol-ogy offers. Craig Venter imagines the engineering ofcertain types of algae to use the carbon dioxide in theatmosphere to create fuels. The idea is so intriguingthat ExxonMobil has invested over $600 million intothis venture and if this succeeds, not only will we beable to solve the problem of fossil fuel dependencebut we may also have a means to combat global cli-mate change.

There is the natural fear that new, never beforesee life-forms may attack all life on earth, whetherby accident or intentional means. Whether this fearis misplaced or not, the scenario is most probably un-likely as any designed organism is likely to have avery narrow purpose and thereby unlikely to posea threat to a large set of organisms and, hence, life ingeneral. Life is robust and has survived on the planetfor over three billion years and has done so by meet-ing the challenges and threats that other pathogenspose.

But to handle such a possibility, Venter has intro-

duced the idea of suicide genes built into his or-ganisms; if an organism does manage to run amok,it can be they can be triggered to kill themselves. In

the book, Jurassic Park, Crichtons dinosaurs werealtered to not produce the amino-acid lysine whichhad to be fed to them by their owners to ensure sur-vival. If any dinosaur escaped from captivity, deathwould have followed in a week.

Besides the ability to engineer organisms de-signed to suit a particular purpose, the promise ofsynthetic biology may be able to answer some of themore profound questions. The answers to the ques-tions of how life came to be may come from our un-derstanding of how to create a living organism our-selves. The Miller-Urey experiment was supposed

to create the amino-acids needed to create life fromthe theorized primordial goo but this experiment re-mains inconclusive and is difficult to replicate.

We have not reached the stage where we can mixinert chemicals to build a living organism. Even thesimplest cell is an extremely complex structure andthe ability to build one of our own from scratch maybe a long way off; we still have a lot to learn. Butthat does not mean it cant or wont happen. Suchan achievement, when it does happen, may have thehumbling effect as we discover our relationship toother life-forms. But it may also provoke the fear thatwe have, once again, over stepped our bounds andtampered with the powers that should belong onlyto deities.

To date, there has been little attention paid by thegeneral public to synthetic biology, its potential orimplications. The expected debate over this issue didnot happen as it did when Dolly was introduced tothe world. The creation of bacteria is too far removedfrom the general publics mind; the organisms aretoo small, too insignificant and too invisible. Whatis more likely to stir peoples emotions and fears iswhen they are able to stare a synthetic life-form inthe face and watch as it stares right back at them.

This newsletter was created with the use of a LATEX style template by David S. Latchman. If you are in needof your own specialized LATEX class or style files, a Beamer Presentation or any other LATEX typsetting task

performed I can be found on Elance.My Elance Page: http://www.elance.com/s/dlatchman/My Home Page: http://thequantumtunnel.wordpress.com/

http://thequantumtunnel.wordpress.com/ 2

http://www.elance.com/s/dlatchman/http://thequantumtunnel.wordpress.com/http://thequantumtunnel.wordpress.com/http://thequantumtunnel.wordpress.com/http://thequantumtunnel.wordpress.com/http://thequantumtunnel.wordpress.com/http://www.elance.com/s/dlatchman/http://www.elance.com/s/dlatchman/