Not ‘Synthetic Life’ : clever, but beware of hype … and the risks

Friday 21 May 2010

Dr Donald Bruce, consultant in ethics and technology, Edinethics Ltd

08456 444937 info@edinethics.co.uk  www.edinethics.co.uk

 

Hold back the hype! Scientists have reproduced a simple genome by sythesising the genetic material from basic chemicals, and at last got it to work inside the cell of a bacterium. Clever, but not synthetic life. Life was already there, this is just our own attempt to see if it still works if we reconstruct some of its parts – in this case synthesising DNA from scratch. As a chemist, I find it no big surprise. In itself, this step just confirms what has been expected for some time. As an ethicist and theologian, does it disturb or excite me? Both.

 

Is it ‘playing God’?  That depends what you mean. Christian belief holds that humans were created ‘in God’s image’. That includes being creative. You could say we are designed by God to be designers. In that sense, we are supposed to ‘play God’. But the other hand, there are limits. Humans are only finite and we are far from perfect. The real ‘playing God’ question is do we pass over either any moral barrier, or exceed our finite and imperfect abilities in doing this?

 

If God laid down the potential for life in the way the universe is, then it is not for humans to claim we have created life in the laboratory. All we are doing is copying what’s there. For all the undoubted ingenuity of this work, our attempts are inevitably pretty crude so far, by comparison with the real thing. These are very simple organisms. The bigger ethical issue is the outcome from synthetic biology research – if we find ways to modify natural life forms into something radically different from present micro-organisms. Here we may need to draw some lines.

 

The scientists relied on yeast bacteria to assemble the pieces. It’s remarkable that microbes can adapt to our somewhat primitive attempts to reconstruct what they do naturally. And here lie some serious risks with manipulating at this level. The more powerful the tool, the more you’ve have to get it very right. One risk is that as this area of science is taken forward, we don’t quite get it right, and the bugs incorporate our mistakes and replicate them. A second risk is as well as the benefits to humankind, the dark side of humanity finds reasons to adapt the same techniques to create seriously dangerous organisms, maybe in their garage. Serious regulation is urgently needed on who is allowed to research and develop synthetic biology and for what purposes.

 

We should start discussing this as a society. Working with the New Economics Foundation and Genomics Forum, we produced a card game called Democs to help lay people explore the issues raised by synthetic biology. If you’d like to explore the issues, you can download it free from :

http://www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/esrcgenomicsnetwork/news/title,22223,en.html

 

Dr Donald Bruce has worked on ethical issues in genetic modification and advanced biotechnology since the mid-1990s, formerly as Director of the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion and Technology Project (1992-2007) and now as an independent consultant on ethics and technology.  Edinethics Ltd is a Scottish Registered Company 323601, Managing Director: Dr Donald M. Bruce, Company Secretary : Mrs E.A.Bruce.

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