Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Life, but Not as We Know It

Last week researchers in America announced that they had created a new kind of artificial life. Is this venture into the unknown fraught with danger, or a useful step forward with beneficial consequences for us all?

by Edwin Cartlidge

To many people, the idea of a living being suggests something that is more than just atoms but also a thing formed with a divine spark or a vital essence. But now what we mean by life itself will have to change following the creation by Craig Venter of the world’s first "synthetic cell". It is, as Venter puts it: "The first self-replicating species that we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer." Venter, the biologist who mapped the human genome in 2001, has designed a bacterial genome on a computer, building the genome from scratch using chemicals, inserting the genome into a hollowed-out cell and then watching that cell reproduce. But have Venter and his colleagues really synthesised new life in the laboratory? And if so, what does this achievement tell us about life itself, and what benefits – and ethical dangers – might it bring to mankind?

The cell created by Venter and colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Maryland is the result of a research programme that has lasted more than a decade and cost around US$40m. As reported in the journal Science, the cell was made in a multi-stage process that included the sequencing, or mapping out, of the one million chemical bases of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. After digitising this code on a computer and tweaking it to eliminate a few unwanted genes and add in "watermarks" that would identify the genome as synthetic, the researchers split the genome into about 1,000 segments of equal length. The job of actually building these segments fell to an outside synthesis company.

Then, with the segments in hand, Venter’s group stitched them together using yeast and inserted the complete synthesised genome into the cell of a different, but related, bacterium. Finally, with the genome of the host bacterium destroyed as a result of the transfer, the cell reproduced to generate multiple copies of Mycoplasma mycoides. The breakthrough has created intense media interest worldwide and has clearly impressed many scientists and other academics, none more so than Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. Describing the work as "monumental", he argues it "brings to an end a 3,000-year-old debate about the nature of life" – whether living things are fundamentally different to non-living things in that they require some kind of a vital spark to animate them. For Caplan, the fact that Venter and co-workers created a living, reproducing cell using a genome that was built up from chemicals and not from other living matter means that the debate has now been settled. "Vitalism has been put to bed," he says.

Caplan acknowledges that for many scientists the notion of vitalism was discredited years ago. As far back as 1828, for example, the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler synthesised urea, used in animal metabolism, from inorganic components. But Caplan believes the latest work is crucial because it provides a graphic demonstration for the layman that there is no such thing as a life force. Others, however, are more circumspect. Gregory Kaebnick, a researcher at the Hastings Center for bioethics in upstate New York, describes the research as a "technical tour de force" but believes that Venter and his colleagues have not really created new life as they have essentially copied the genome of an existing organism and then made use of the complex cell machinery already provided by biology. He also doesn’t think it fundamentally changes our understanding of life. "I do adopt a kind of materialist perspective," he adds, "but I don’t think it is required by this research."

For Kaebnick, the real breakthrough in this line of research will come when it leads to the creation of organisms not found in nature. Venter’s team aims to produce what it calls the "minimal genome", in other words, the minimum set of genes needed to sustain life in its simplest form, which they will do by

removing as many genes as they can from the synthetic genome without killing it off. By analysing the function of every essential gene, they then hope to manipulate this minimal genome so as to create organisms more powerful than those that can be made using the gene-by-gene modification of today’s genetic engineering. Such organisms might, for example, make vaccines, suck up greenhouse gases or produce biofuels. Indeed, Venter’s company, Synthetic Genomics, has a contract with Exxon to generate biofuels from algae that could be worth US$600m if the gene synthesisers come up trumps.

This potential for beneficial applications has been cautiously welcomed by the Catholic Church. Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, neonatologist Carlo Bellieni argued that because an organism’s genome does not work in isolation Venter’s team had "in reality not created life but substituted one of its engines".

But Bellieni described the result as "interesting" and said that it has the potential for good. Genetic engineering, he added, acts "on a very fragile terrain" which requires both "courage and caution".

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, meanwhile, described the work as a "further sign of intelligence, God’s gift to understand creation and be able to better govern it", but added that "intelligence can never be without responsibility". For Bagnasco, as for Monsignor Rino Fisichella, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the research must ultimately be judged against its respect for human dignity. "It’s a great scientific discovery," Fisichella told Associated Press Television News. "Now we have to understand how it will be implemented in the future."

Kaebnick believes that both the potential benefits and the potential risks of the research are "huge", but that more must be done to understand the nature of these risks, be they accidents in labs, organisms escaping into the environment, or terrorism. Caplan likewise thinks that the potential for good is "very great" but he too is concerned by the potential downside, pointing to humans’ "dismal track record" in, for example, controlling the spread of pollen from genetically modified crops or preventing damage from unwanted rabbits, beetles and other non-native species. He suggests, however, that it may be possible to introduce novel measures to limit the potentially harmful spread of new organisms, such as writing a kind of auto-destruct mechanism into the genomes of these novel life forms.

Venter maintains that his group has been concerned with the ethical implications of its research since the outset, having had its work subjected to a number of reviews including one by Caplan and other bioethics experts at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. Now the research is to be investigated as part of a review of the potential risks of synthetic biology by a White House ethics panel. President Barack Obama of the United States, who wants the panel to report back to him within six months, said that the work by Venter and colleagues raised "genuine concerns".

The Canadian-based think tank and pressure group ETC Group takes a stronger line. It maintains that there is a lack of national and international oversight of synthetic biology and has called for a worldwide halt to research in this area "pending the development of global regulations". One of the group’s members, Jim Thomas, describes the latest work as "the quintessential Pandora’s box moment", likening it to the splitting of the atom or the cloning of Dolly the sheep. "We will all have to deal with the fall-out from this alarming experiment," he says.

For Stephen Napier of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, however, there is nothing "intrinsically evil or wrong" with the creation of the synthetically controlled cell. He maintains that humans already exert "dominion over nature", pointing out, for example, that the development of disease

therapies involves the control of pathogens. The important thing, he says, is to carry out scientific research so that it is "oriented to the human person".

■Edwin Cartlidge is a Rome-based writer specialising in science.