Let there be life!
Science scores another milestone with J. Craig Venter Institute’s first critter with ‘synthetic’ DNA. When we last left our hero, Venter had scored two much ballyhooed accomplishments. First, he transfered the complete genetic material from one bacterium to another, effectively transforming the recipient cell into the species of the donor. He also managed to completely synthesize the genome of an existing bacterium.
In this latest milestone, he took the synthetic genome and implanted it into another bacterium (whose genetic material had been removed), and voila – he ended up with a living bacterium of the donor species whose genome had been synthesized.
As with any significant new development of this magnitude, all the usual bloviators are out there, from boosters claiming how this will create a cure for British Petroleum, to skeptical peers saying that this is really nothing new, from doom-sayers warning that this will be used by so-called bio-terrorists, to self-appointed ‘moralists’ who claim that only God can create life.
It’s that last bit that I find so fascinating. Think of the Herculean nearly two centuries-long attack on Evolution by Troglodytic Creationists – just to justify some cockamamie back-of-the napkin calculations of the world’s age made by some drunken Anglican Minister back in the day!
The Creationists (and their misshapen offspring, the Intelligent Designer crowd) have created torturous arguments against gradual speciation driven by natural selection. My first thought, upon hearing of the Venter achievement, was that this would really blow their minds. If humans can completely synthesize an existing genome, and implant that into a bacterial cell ‘shell’ to create a synthetic clone, it will be fairly trivial for us to design and synthesize a completely novel genome – carrying out an act that, according to the countless dress-wearing, bearded hierarchs of fundamentalist orthodoxy – can only be done by God.
You might argue that since Venter used the de-genomed cell body of the recipient bacteria to host his creation, rather than creating a cell body ‘from scratch,’ that we haven’t fully succeeded in creating life. And indeed, it may be some time before scientists can ‘synthesize’ a usable cell body. However I won’t be surprised on the day when Venter or some similar pioneer does just that – and it will be impossible to argue that humans can not only create a novel species, but in fact can quicken organic matter.
But at the end of the day I don’t think the Troglodytes will have any trouble dealing with this or future events. In fact, I’m guessing that this will just add fuel to the fire of their crazy reasoning – if a person can design and create a living creature from scratch, surely (they will argue) that is evidence that God did so for every living creature.
In the article Designing Minds, Edward Wasserman has an interesting argument about the whole Creationist concept of the God as Watchmaker. He takes a close look at very human inventions, from complex tools to various behaviors such as how a high jumper does a Fosbury Flop or a modern jockey does the monkey crouch, and points out that most human ‘inventions’ really come about through an evolutionary process and not whole cloth from the genius of the lone ‘Edison’ toiling in the lab.
I would imagine that artificial life will most likely ‘evolve’ in the context of the marketplace, with critters that provide wonderous humanity-benefiting boons getting tossed in the crapper, while critters providing solid commercial attributes rising to the top to reproduce in their quintillions to produce money-making pharmecuticals, junk-food additives and other things that will separate the consumer from his/her Euro or Yuan.
And in the meantime, the Trogs will continue to joust at evolution curriculums and abortion doctors and give Big Pharma a pass at Being God.
