Its alive! Alive! Well, almost.

Warning: a longish, unfocused post about the linked news because I was excited by this and just felt like brain dumping.

Craig Venter, who led the team that published the first complete genome of an individual human, is in the news again. A team led by Venter has constructed a complete genome from scratch (more at The Guardian) .

The genome is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium but has been built entirely from scratch rather than simply being a modified genome from an existing organism. The artificial genome has a third less genetic material than that of Mycoplasma genitalium, copying only the bare essentials required for it to function in a living cell.

Its not quite artificial life yet. For that, Venter and his team must replace the DNA of an existing cell with the artificial DNA, at which point, if all goes well, the artificial DNA will take control of the cell. They plan to do this over the next few months.

The team has named the anticipated organism Mycoplasma laboratorium.

Positive Applications

The reason I'm blogging about this is that there are obviously an enormous number of potential applications. Living organisms are self-manufacturing and have the kind of intricate machinery that takes enormous effort to emulate using non-organic materials and methods. The buzz around nanotechnology has always been predicated on the obvious benefits of having millions of tiny machines working in concert that we see in organisms.

The manufacturing applications of piggybacking custom functionality on a self-replicating molecule like DNA are numerous. In terms of the opportunities the technology affords its akin to the harnessing of electricity, which we use to power so many processes.

Among the uses being suggested by Venter is the production of biofuels. Current techniques for extracting biofuels from crops are costly in terms of the arable land required to produce useful amounts of fuel and threaten our food security. But pared-down, dedicated biofuel-producing bacteria could conceivably increase the efficiency of production to the point where we can meet the world's renewable energy requirements without threatening food security.

Not Entirely Novel

It obviously has to be acknowledged that genetically modified organisms are old news. But reconstructing the genome in its entirety the way Venter's team have done allows a significant increase in the efficiency of the final organism in doing whatever the designer wants it to do.

Concerns

Obviously its a Pandora's Box. The techniques used by Venter's team could be used to engineer sophisticated bioweapons. Also, I predict a great deal of criticism based on widely held views about the sanctity of life, especially the life that is represented by complex metazoans like humans.

According to the Guardian article, Mycoplasma laboratorium has 580,000 base pairs. The human genome has roughly 3 billion, more than 5,000 times more. So assuming the construction of Mycoplasma laboratorium took a fair amount of time, I doubt the same techinques could be used to build completely customised humanoids in the near future.

However, most useful manufacturing processes have a way of rapidly advancing when they enjoy significant commercial success - and even the problem of designing such a complex creature, which appears at first glance to require a lot of conscious human-powered analysis, could be significantly enhanced by sophisticated computer programs. So I don't think its too outlandish to say its a short leap from a designer bacterium to Frankenstein's monster, absent likely restrictions.

For those who revere life as sacred - in the original, religious sense - I foresee the possibility of artificial biological humanoids, or even artificial biological cats and dogs, being a major bogeyman, but it doesn't concern me too much, since I don't. Not to say I don't feel compassion for all complex metazoans and passionately support kindness and respect for said, just that the respect I feel is premised on an instinctive sense of compassion and empathy rather than a belief in any natural or God-given ethic that prohibits meddling. And I don't think someone is going to do mass experimentation on large organisms or produce a clone army, a la Star Wars, without a lot of people noticing and intervening.

What is more concerning is the potential for sophisticated bioweapons. Already there are no small number of conspiracy theorists who believe that AIDS is an artificial disease designed to wipe out this ethnic group or that unpopular lifestyle. The ability to customize living molecules at this level obviously brings with it the potential to make weapons that are at the same time devastatingly effective and precisely targeted. The nightmare scenarios are those already in wide circulation among conspiracy theorists and in popular fiction: Deadly diseases that target specific genders (read Frank Herbert's White Plague), ethnic groups, people with particular lifestyles - or specific combinations of all three.

I have no idea how we will limit these possible negative applications in the future and have little doubt there will be calls in some quarters to put a stop to this kind of research (actually I'm surprised at how little debate about this there is on the Web right now). But the genie is out of the bottle. A lot of people know it can be done. And if they want to do it, they eventually will. If/when that happens, we will need the scientific expertise to be up to the challenge of responding appropriately