SYNTHETIC life could be just around the corner - depending on what you mean by "synthetic".
Last week, genomics pioneer Craig Venter announced that his team has passed an important milestone in its efforts to create a bacterial cell whose genome is entirely synthetic - constructed chemically from the building blocks of DNA. Venter claims this goal could be achieved within months.
But while Venter's synthetic genome will be housed within an existing bacterial cell, other scientists are aiming for the even more ambitious target of building an entire living cell from the basic chemical ingredients. Giovanni Murtas of the Enrico Fermi Centre at the University of Rome 3, Italy, reported last week at the Synthetic Biology 3.0 meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, that his team had taken a step toward this goal by successfully synthesising proteins in cell-like compartments.
According to George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has devised a complete blueprint for a synthetic cell, an investment of around $10 million would be enough to turn the "bottom-up" dream into reality. "Our approach doesn't require any super new technology," he says.
Whichever definition of synthetic life you adopt, it seems now to be a question of when rather than if. "We are at the doorstep of being able to create life," says Steen Rasmussen, a physicist trying to create artificial living systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The creation of synthetic life should lead to many questions about traditional views of creation. With forty percent of America's population having literal, fundamentalist views, this will be another question for to answer.
Tags: Creation, synthetic life, George Church, Craig Venter, Steen Rasmussen
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