A recent article in The New Yorker entitled "A Life of its Own" included the following quotes about synthetic biology: "For the first time God has competition." -Nature 2007
and
"What if we could liberate ourselves from the tyranny of evolution by being able to design our own offspring?" -Drew Endy
Synthetic biology is the science of engineering organisms to produce something or do something new. Genes from different organisms are brought together in a single organism to perform some new function.
The upshot of this article seems to be that the practitioners of synthetic biology can do a better job at creating/designing/selecting life than either God or evolution. That seems pretty arrogant to me...even for professors at MIT and Stanford.
As an evolutionary biologist who works at the fringes of synthetic biology by engineering and accelerating the evolution of antibiotic resistance genes, I am very impressed by the potential of synthetic biology. I attended a talk a couple of years ago amorphadiene, which is a precursor to artemisinin, an excellent antimalarial drug produced by plants. While this drug is affordable in developed nations, it is too expensive at 10 cents per dose for most Africans to afford. Jay Keasling was able to cobble together the genes and pathways necessary to get bacteria and yeast to produce amorphadiene. This has made the drug artemisinin affordable in Africa.
I think that this project is a small demonstration of the potential of this type of science. However, it is not the only demonstration of this type of science. Organisms have been cobbling together genes and pathways as long as they have existed. For example simple comparison of the genomes of most strains of E. coli with strain O157:H7 shows how different genes from viruses and pathogens have been assembled in O157:H7 to make it capable of invading and taking control of the cells of the human digestive tract. On a more positive note, the bacteria that are resistant to toxins and and able to help in bioremediation efforts often have numerous genes assembled from many organisms.
While I fully support the use of evolutionary tools by scientists to develop technologies that support human interests, I think it is dangerous when humans think that they are superior to natural forces. Billions of dollars have been spent to develop semisynthetic antibiotics with the thought that man could do a better job creating antibiotics than nature, but resistance to those antibiotics has developed more rapidly in some cases than resistance to naturally produced antibiotics.
A more worrisome aspect of drastically changing life without evolution is that deleterious effects of combining genes from different organisms can be ameliorated by mutation and selection as a new combination of genes spreads through a population. When substances are produced synthetically and then distributed throughout populations, their deleterious effects have not necessarily been detected or removed. It is possible that great harm could come upon large populations through synthetic biology because the purging process of evolution was eliminated.
More disturbing to me than the claim that synthetic biology is better than evolution, is the claim that it is better than God. When I watched Gattaca in high school, I thought that there was no way that humans would be able to pick the traits that they wanted their children to have. I thought that the movie was simple an overly imaginative writer going a little wild with sci-fi. However, the technologies that are necessary to custom build children exist now. They are not affordable or practical, but at some point they might be. It seems that artists and writers inspire scientists with wild futuristic ideas and that scientists make those ideas become reality. In a small way a scientist becomes a god in his or her laboratory....growing life and destroying it...proclaiming what is good and what isn't. However, as scientists do this, they are often dwelling within the confines of relatively small offices and labs where most of the problems that confront society don't exist. To most scientists the perception and purpose of God is limited to the first two chapters of Genesis where the creation of the earth is described. If the only purpose of God is to create, then I wonder why the rest of the Bible (not to mention other scriptural texts) exists.
I guess that there are a number of people whose knowledge of the scriptures is greater than scientists because they have expanded their scriptural repertoire to include a verse of John that reads: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3). Those individuals go to war with scientists about whether God and evolution are real and I worry that ethical decisions about how the organisms with synthetically engineered functions or characteristics should be used and treated are given less and less consideration. Many people perceive cloned organisms as mindless zombies, when, in fact, a cloned human would be a real individual with and independent mind and emotions. If the time comes when human cloning is performed, I worry that those individuals might not be treated as well as non-cloned people. When scientists start declaring that their works are greater than God and evolution, I worry that the morals relevant in their own small universes might not be sufficient for society. I find myself hoping that they are not the ones who will be making the ethical decisions about what should be done with their work.
