Human-engineered genome a reality
January 27th 2008 09:28
J. Craig Venter, the famous geneticist and biotechnology entrepreneur, is a man of vision. What does he, and other scientists of similar vision, want? Organisms that can be programmed - in the same sense as computer software are - to perform a whole suite of functions for us. This is no idle futuristic speculation, for the pace of bioengineering is such that the creation of a fully synthetic life form is expected to come true in the very near future, possibly even in the coming year. There are still some odds and ends to iron out, but you can rest assured that it will be achieved.
There is a lovely philosophical footnote to all this. The researchers refer to the organisms they want to engineer as "biological robots". But organisms are already robots; as Richard Dawkins said in the first chapter of his famous book The Selfish Gene, "Today, they [the replicators] go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." The history of evolution has been one of engineering. The engineer, of course, was not a conscious engineer or a deity, but something more subtle and interesting: an unguided process called natural selection. All sorts of chemical wizardry had already been invented by nature well before our species even arrived on the scene. Now that we know a whole lot (though not everything) about the recipe for building an organism, we can take this knowledge and engineer life "directly". This will eventually be standardised so that an engineer can literally sit at a terminal and punch in some instructions that will be translated into the relevant base-pair sequences at the lowest level.
Here is a good article by Alexis Madrigal in Wired magazine about the J. Craig Venter Institute's latest advances in this field.
An excerpt:
"The first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995 and was followed by the landmark sequencing of the human genome in 2001. Based on that trajectory, Voigt estimated that a synthetic human genome -- which could be used in human cloning research -- could be created by 2014.
"But before researchers can do that level of synthetic biology, scientists will need to automate their methods. Beyond this work, Voigt said, scientists will need programming tools, in the same way computer scientists use higher level programming languages like Fortran, C and Java, to control computer function."
There is a lovely philosophical footnote to all this. The researchers refer to the organisms they want to engineer as "biological robots". But organisms are already robots; as Richard Dawkins said in the first chapter of his famous book The Selfish Gene, "Today, they [the replicators] go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." The history of evolution has been one of engineering. The engineer, of course, was not a conscious engineer or a deity, but something more subtle and interesting: an unguided process called natural selection. All sorts of chemical wizardry had already been invented by nature well before our species even arrived on the scene. Now that we know a whole lot (though not everything) about the recipe for building an organism, we can take this knowledge and engineer life "directly". This will eventually be standardised so that an engineer can literally sit at a terminal and punch in some instructions that will be translated into the relevant base-pair sequences at the lowest level.
Here is a good article by Alexis Madrigal in Wired magazine about the J. Craig Venter Institute's latest advances in this field.
An excerpt:
"The first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995 and was followed by the landmark sequencing of the human genome in 2001. Based on that trajectory, Voigt estimated that a synthetic human genome -- which could be used in human cloning research -- could be created by 2014.
"But before researchers can do that level of synthetic biology, scientists will need to automate their methods. Beyond this work, Voigt said, scientists will need programming tools, in the same way computer scientists use higher level programming languages like Fortran, C and Java, to control computer function."
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