Posted on 06/07/2007 11:24:50 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
A scientist is poised to create the world's first man-made species, a synthetic microbe that could lead to an endless supply of biofuel.
Craig Venter, an American who cracked the human genome in 2000, has applied for a patent at more than 100 national offices to make a bacterium from laboratory-made DNA.
It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases.
DNA contains the instructions to make the proteins that build and run an organism.
The J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is applying for worldwide patents on what it refers to as "Mycoplasma laboratorium". based on DNA assembled by scientists. Yesterday, Mr Venter said: "It is only an application on methods."
As for whether the world's first synthetic bug was thriving in a test tube in Rockville, all he would say was: "We are getting close."
The Venter Institute's US Patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic "free-living organism that can grow and replicate" that is made using those genes.
To create the synthetic organism his team is making snippets of DNA, known as oligonucleotides or "oligos", of up to 100 letters of DNA.
To build a primitive bug, with about 500 genes in half a million letters of DNA, Mr Venter's team is stitching together blocks of 50 or so letters, then growing them in the gut bug E coli. Then they turn these many small pieces into a handful of bigger ones until eventually two pieces can be assembled into the circular genome of the new life form.
The synthetic DNA will be added to a test tube of bacteria and the team hopes that one or more microbes among the one hundred thousand million starts moving, metabolising and multiplying.
The Canadian ETC Group, which tracks developments in biotechnology, believes that this development in synthetic biology is more significant than the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago.
Yesterday, an ETC spokesman, Jim Thomas, called on the world's patent offices to reject the applications.
He said: "These monopoly claims signal the start of a high-stakes commercial race to synthesise and privatise synthetic life forms. Will Venter's company become the 'Microbesoft' of synthetic biology?" A colleague, Pat Mooney, said: "For the first time, God has competition. Venter and his colleagues have breached a societal boundary, and the public hasn't even had a chance to debate the far-reaching social, ethical and environmental implications of synthetic life."
However, Mr Venter did ask a panel of experts to examine the implications of creating synthetic life. His institute convened a bioethics committee to see if its plans were likely to raise objections.
The committee, led by Mildred Cho at Stanford University, had no objections to the work but pointed out that scientists must take responsibility for any impact their new organisms had if they got out of the lab. The organisms can be designed to die as soon as they leave laboratory conditions.
Mr Venter first announced the project to build a synthetic life form in 2002. In theory, by adding functionalised synthetic DNA, the bacterium could be instructed to produce plastics, drugs or fuels.
Mr Venter's institute claims that its stripped-down microbe could be the key to cheap energy production. The patent application specifically claims an organism that can make either hydrogen or ethanol for industrial fuels. The research was partially funded by the US Department of Energy.
“God has competition.”
Famous Last Words.
Not going to pitch you inside too much, but isn’t our God bigger than DNA?
The scientific method is a gift to the fallen mankind. How man uses it is what differentiates Good from Evil.
The worry is that God is going to go the way of Katrina and the Waves — a couple of fun singles but no staying power. Once we understand DNA well enough to create designer organisms, it’s all over. It’s like the time you were first able to read TV Guide and didn’t need to trust your parents to tell you what’s on.
That would be like people claiming to be Hindus and Buddhists announcing a way to cheat karma.
In that story, the virus with impossible properties was alien. The human error was to inadvertently introduce it into the earth’s atmosphere, while its nature remained unknown. In this case we are contemplating a production of the human intellect, which seems to follow the moral pattern of Cat’s Cradle, even if the novel’s premise was based on simple physics instead of biology.
If they can make ethanol, perhaps they can make crude oil, instead.
Otherwise we wind up with a lot of idle refinery capacity and unemployed refinery and oil industry workers.
Plus we wouldn’t need to modify our vehicles. And finally we could flood the world with our synthetic crude oil, drive the price down, and harm our mortal mideast enemies.
Tinkering with the created order is nothing new. The consequences when it begins to undermine man’s own station are something else. This is like a bunch of untalented hacks taking over Hollywood by force and forcing their own TV programs on everybody.
“It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases.”
In the year 2112: “Efforts at defeating the microbe have not worked and crops continue to fail due to the cold climate, lack of CO2, and increased amounts of hydrogen in the atmosphere.”
Even such things as how the microbes in the guts of termites turn otherwise indigestible cellulose into energy for these bugs, is virtually unknown at present. This project sounds like a (pardon the specific religious reference) hail Mary pass. Being able to reproduce on large scale what happens in termite guts is likely going to take much studied research.
Exactly!
And if you’ve got a better product than Hollywood, you can sell it and ruin the competition.
Free markets are ‘da bomb.
Thank God the market for organisms is finally opening up. He’s been at it for a long time with diappointing results.
Anything which could get out and cause mischief like that, should, ethically speaking, be made as controllable as possible. As in vulnerable to dozens of completely different antibiotics.
Think what happens when the sellers become the sold.
Ahhhhh.
You’re thinking we shouldn’t make a big move like that without an exit strategy.
Hmmmm.
I grant you that’s a weighty consideration. But it’s not decisive. Look at Iraq, for example.
I for one would be a mite disappointed to see it work TOO well and find what had been our forests, gardens, and crops reduced to pools of oil where they stand, followed shortly by the suffocation of all breathing animal and human life.
Making ethanol now is cheap because yeast reproduces itself when exposed to sugar. Of course this cellulose "bug" could get loose and eat all our crops and houses, and grass, and forests, and........, well, at least the whole planet could get loaded with the ethanol they produced. We would need a bunch of Coke, or tonic or something though.
The termites do not run on ethanol, they run on sugars. But even the termite gut chemistry is a complex bit of symbiosis that hasn’t been well explicated.
“It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases.”
Hmmm. A bug that destroys or “eats” water vapor.
The Christian’s dogma was run over by the Buddist’s karma.
LOL! I’m in the presence of greatness.
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