God : Competition? Huh. OK, let's have a "competition"...
Just funnin'... : )
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.
A brilliant british researcher, who was tinkering with bacteria, gave us the drug resistant Staph infection that is all over the place now.
I’m not so sure they need to be actually inventing new microbes.
That’s nothing. I hear talk about an intelligent designer that’s given us far worse.
Any synthetic life form will not mutate to survive outside the controlled conditions in the lab. I am looking with great skepticism at this so called synthetic microbe, and I bet the concept will not be reality for at least 10 years. The Arabs are safe for now!
Yah. I know what you mean. I had the same reservations about Iraq.
God : Competition? Huh. OK, let's have a "competition"...
Just funnin'... : )
Patents? You mean he plans to make money on a fuel source? Shameful.
I think any benevolent creator would deign "Katrina and the Waves" just a bit spurious. Many of us are reconciled with that horrible anachronistic concept of a Divine Creator, despite (and, usually complimentary of) advances in the human condition.
What's out there isn't all going to be known in our lifetimes. It's wonderful and friggin' HUGE. As a "simple" troglodyte Believer, it's even more wondrous.
DNA is just scattered proteins. What "is" CL?
Hey, we’ve got to let humans do jobs that God Himself won’t do.
But seriously, folks, one can’t patent something that has not been “reduced to practice.” That means that you cannot just patent a cool idea. You have to make it work.
IMO, a patent should not be issued until they show a working model.
For those that want to know how one could make the bug not be able to live outside of the laboratory, the genetic make up could be missing the ability to make one or two amino acids. Unless these amino acids are supplied in the growth medium, the bug could not grow. Also, one would not expect the bug to be able to mutate and become able to make the amino acids because there is no “pressure” to select for this characteristic. When a bacteria becomes resistant to an antibiotic, they are in the presence of the antibiotic and any mutations that occur favoring the survival of the bacteria will take over the population..sort of survival of the fittest on a small scale....micro-evolution, not macro.
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