The Wall Street Journal-20080125-Scientists Advance In Effort to Create Synthetic Organism
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080125
Scientists Advance In Effort to Create Synthetic Organism
Biologist Craig Venter and his team replicated a bacterium's genetic structure entirely from laboratory chemicals, moving one step closer to creating the world's first living artificial organism.
The scientists assembled the synthetic genome by stringing together chemicals that are the building blocks of DNA. The synthetic genome was constructed so it included all the genes that would be found in a naturally occurring bacterium.
The research was published in the online version of the journal Science by a team of scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md. The authors include Hamilton Smith, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1978.
"It's the second significant step of a three-step process to create a synthetic organism," said Dr. Venter, in a conference call with reporters. The final step could prove far trickier, though Dr. Venter defied his critics and deciphered the human genome with startling speed about eight years ago.
The larger quest is to make artificial life forms with a minimum set of genes necessary for life. It is hoped that such organisms could one day be engineered to perform commercial tasks, such as absorbing carbon dioxide from the air or churning out biofuels.
The scientific challenge of creating synthetic life isn't trivial, nor are the ethical and legal concerns. There is little government oversight, and researchers involved in such experiments regulate themselves. Detractors worry that the lack of safeguards increases the risks that a potentially dangerous man-made organism might run amok. (In creating the artificial genome of Mycoplasma, Dr. Venter's team disrupted the genes that would enable it to infect other organisms.)
Nonetheless, the science is pushing forward at a rapid pace. In June, a Venter-led team published details of an experiment in which it inserted the DNA of one species of bacteria into the cells of another bacteria species. That process almost magically "booted up" the genome of the donor bacteria, sparking it to life.
The team hopes to use a similar trick to boot up the artificially created genome, to create a man-made living organism. But, Dr. Venter said, "there are multiple barriers" to achieving that goal.
Dr. Venter now believes that the challenge of creating a synthetic organism is within his grasp. "I'll be. . . disappointed if we can't do it in 2008," he said.
