The Ethics Of Creating Synthetic Life “C…
The Ethics Of Creating Synthetic Life “Craig Venter’s team have succeeded in producing a synthetic bacterium capable of self-replication. The group synthesised from scratch a variant of the Mycoplasma mycoides genome, which they then transplanted into a different Mycoplasma species to produce a bacterium controlled by the synthetic genome. The resulting bacterium could be regarded as the first truly synthetic organism. Earlier forms of genetic engineering have involved modifying the genome of an existing organism; Venter’s group have produced an organism whose genome was instead pieced together from chemical building blocks. [...]
In synthesising novel organisms from scratch, synthetic biologists are ‘playing God’, and doing so much more effectively than earlier genetic engineers. They are not just tinkering with life, they are designing and creating it. [...]
Venter’s work also challenges the common sense distinction between living things and machines. [...]
[...] synthetic entities will be misused, for example, in bioterrorism or biological warfare. [...] Synthetic biology means an end to the age of innocence for the life sciences.”
“One of the most widespread and longstanding moral beliefs is that there is an important difference between living organisms and inanimate machines. [...]
By contrast, nobody thinks that it is wrong to destroy, create, or tamper with a machine — even if the machine in question is exceedingly complex. This moral distinction is put in crisis by the synthetic biology projects of Venter and others. Going forward, we will need to find a more meaningful moral distinction than the line between the animate and the inanimate.”
“We have come up against similar problems in other domains—most notably, in work on nanotechnology and gene transfer technology—but synthetic biology poses them especially sharply and pressingly.” http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/thc-mir052010.php
“What that literally means is the capacity to be a creator. [...] [GLENN MCGEE, FOUNDER OF AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS AND FRANCIS PROFESSOR IN BIOETHICS]
So far we have seen [elsewhere] the construction of polio and mouse pox but these are just small fry compared to what might happen when you can go down the path of engineering organisms that could never naturally exist. [...] [JULIAN SAVULESCU, HEAD OF OXFORD UEHIRO CENTRE FOR PRACTICAL ETHICS]
We don’t think you can create life. One can modify and manipulate already existing biological material. No-one [is] able to create life from scratch. There have been claims before that life has been created. [...] [JOHN HAAS, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC BIOETHICS CENTER]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8696046.stm
[Update:] Ongoing Q&A with one of the creators of the synthetic bacterial cell: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_creators_of_the_first_synthetic/
