CREATING NEW SPECIES
The debate on "Synthetic Biology" is just getting going in the UK, with a pre-Christmas speaking tour by Craig Venter, the US businessman who is the most famous figure in this field, and an early January get-together of worried and sceptical NGO representatives.
The debate is expected to move up several gears some time in the first half of 2008, not only in the UK but worldwide, with the anticipated announcement by Venter of the first successful engineering of a new life form from genetic "components". This is not the same as "creating life in a test tube": the components are biological rather than simply human-created chemicals. But it will be the first time human beings have become so skilled at dealing with genetic bits and pieces that our species gets beyond gathering, hunting, farming, and even genetically modifying other species to actually constructing a new species which does not exist in nature.
This will be an event perhaps as significant as the first landing on the moon. Like the moon landing, taking human beings beyond this planet, the artificial construction of a new species of bacteria could prove just the beginning of something of more than mere historical importance: it could count on a much longer timescale than that
. These are very dangerous times. Once genetic codes are cracked sufficiently to make possible the assembling of biological "building blocks", what new species might be created, what might they do, what effects might that have - and, of course, because this is business after all as well as science, who will make the decisions, who will make the profits, and who will be losing out? For example, there is a major research project, supported by the Gates Foundation, taking place to combat malaria through the use of synthetic biology. But equally, it would be possible to engineer new biological weapons, creating bacteria which do not exist in nature and which there is no natural antidote for.
Craig Venter (with support from BP) promises the engineering of synthetic algae which will be hyperefficient at absorbing carbon dioxide, thereby solving the problem of global climate change. But if organisms like these enter the environment, who knows what consequences there might be for other species which cannot possibly have evolved to adapt to or cope with these new artificial creations?
If it becomes possible to create (as the Du Pont chemicals firm is working on at the moment) new biology-based fuel sources, what happens to the economics of petroleum and land, and what happens to the people who eat the food currently grown on the land which would be converted to the more profitable business of fuel production? There have already been riots in Mexico in response to natural biofuels and their effect on food prices, but that may be just the beginning.
Politicians, lawyers, regulators, and the general public are once again lagging way behind the agenda being rapidly moved on by science and money. It is vital that the debate about synthetic biology and its implications gets going on a much larger scale than we have seen so far.
There is also an article in The New Scientist this week suggesting that this time the Bio Tech Companies mean to get this all through and are gearing up more thoroughly than last time
. Victor Anderson and Miriam Kennet January 2008
