Making artificial life: Are scientists playing God?

The Associated Press

Craig Venter says he's on the verge of making an artificial life form.

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Making artificial life: Are scientists playing God?

Science has made enormous leaps over the past decade in the study of life. Researchers have unlocked the human genome, cloned animals and manipulated stem cells toward making new organs. It's an exciting and terrifying new world.

Now biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter has announced the creation of a synthetic chromosome, knocking down one of the final hurdles to building the world's first artificial life form.

It's a fairly simple biological structure that Venter and his team have made, but the implications could be massive.

Is this breakthrough good for humanity? Or should there be more discussion about the unintended consequences of manipulating the building blocks of life?

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The Times (UK)

The synthetic biology that Craig Venter is pioneering springs from an attitude that scientists are building machines, not living things.

These are seen as computers capable of replicating themselves, with genes as software controlling hardware cells – a view that dates from Watson’s and Crick’s discoveries in 1953. But Venter is taking the process to a new level by creating new hardware and software where none existed.

The question is, who will benefit most – Venter or mankind?

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Leo Hickman/Guardian

While this kind of science is utterly breathtaking, it does also set off obvious alarm bells. Are we really sure we know what we are doing by releasing an artificial life form from the confines of the Petri dish into the wider world? Should science of this magnitude and with such potentially epic implications for our species and the planet be allowed to remain under the lock and key of a commercial patent, as Venter is currently hoping to be the case?

There may come a time soon where we are forced to take some big gambles with such technology, but I know that I for one would be very nervous the first time such designer bugs entered the atmosphere for no other reason than that a distinct line in the sand will have been irreversibly crossed forever.