A creation question

Molecular biologist J. Craig Venter’s announcement last week sounded like something out of a science-fiction film (or a Michael Crichton thriller): His team created living bacteria cells from genetic material designed by computer and assembled in a laboratory. Venter didn’t exactly pull a Dr. Frankenstein — bacteria aren’t complex organisms, and Venter’s team didn’t start completely from scratch. Still, his feat raises difficult questions about the expanding boundaries of science and the nature of life.

Scientists have made slow but steady progress in decoding the relationship between genes and cell functions, and in modifying organisms’ DNA by inserting new segments. Venter’s team appears to be the first to successfully replace all of a cell’s genes with a man-made genome. The researchers had copied the genome from an existing bacterium, Mycoplamsa mycoides, with a few tweaks thrown in as watermarks. They then inserted the laboratory-made DNA into a related but smaller microbe, which replicated itself into new cells controlled by the synthetic genes. The achievement was an incremental step for the group, which previously had replaced all of a bacterium’s genes with those of a related species. Yet it also pushes the ethical and moral questions surrounding such research to a whole new level.

Did Venter’s breakthrough amount to creating life, or just modifying it? The answer matters profoundly. The genetic material was man-made, but the cell was formed by nature. The DNA needed a cell to inhabit; the cell needed DNA to dictate its nature and replication pattern.

Either way, Venter’s achievement suggests that humanity will have to consider a far more complicated definition of life in the future. Most of what we are is determined by our DNA. Will organisms produced Venter’s way deserve the same protections as those created naturally? What would we do if the organisms prove innately superior to their unmodified brethren and start to crowd them out? What if these organisms were human? What does all this say about the religious notion that only God can create life? Doesn’t it lend credence to the theory that life could have arisen naturally from the teeming laboratory of Earth’s beginnings?

For better or worse, we’ll have years to debate these issues. Scientists have yet to unlock the secret of how to get genes to work together in a chromosome, or how to engineer complex genomes. So the foreseeable scientific advances arising from Venter’s breakthrough would center on microbes as possible tools for good, such as environmental cleanup, or for evil, such as biological weapons. But if the technology grows exponentially more sophisticated, the arguments about the sanctity of life will make the debate over stem cells look tame.