Reality check on "Synthetic Life"⤒🔗

Craig Venter creates synthetic life form

The Guardian (May 20)

It's alive! Artificial DNA controls life

MSNBC.com (May 20)

Scientists create a living organism

CNN.com (May 21)

In May you may have heard some rather big claims be­ing made about what a scientist, a certain J. Craig Venter, had accomplished.

Now Dr. Venter has long pushed the envelope on what biotechnology can achieve. However even greater than the success of his efforts are the hyperbole and nonsensical claims which have greeted his achievements. Dr. Venter did manage to insert an artificially produced copy of genetic in­formation from a very simple cell into the cell of a similar species from which its own genetic instructions had been removed. The inserted genetic information then successfully directed the life processes of the recipient cell. This achieve­ment represented not the synthetic creation of life – as some were claiming - but the extension of processes already in commercial use.

The very best that Science can do←↰⤒🔗

Mycoplasmas are tiny disease-causing bacteria that live only inside (unfortunate) hosts. Since their environment is so uniform, they need only an unusually small number of genes. M. genitalium, for example, exhibits a genome of only 500 genes made up in total of about 600,000 base pairs (like letters). However 100 genes can be deleted with no obvious effects, so scientists think the minimum number of genes required to maintain life processes may be on the order of only 400 genes. Thus the Mycoplasma species, with their low number of genes, seemed like ideal organisms to use in this experiment.

In the present research, Dr. Venter synthesized the 1.1 million base pair gnome of Mycoplasma mycoides (which in­fects goats). He then transferred this genome into a cell of Mycoplasma capricolum, (a similar species).

However the process was not straightforward. It required $40 million and 20 people working for more than a decade to achieve the desired result.

Copying Another's design←↰⤒🔗

For the first step the Venter team started with a comput­er record of the proper sequence of base pairs in M. mycoides. Then they ordered from a commercial company, 1,000 dif­ferent, specially-prepared strands of DNA, each about 1,000 base pairs long. They thus had all the starting material they needed for the entire genome of the bacterium.

Life needed to "make" Life←↰⤒🔗

These strands obviously had to be attached in the right order and this could not be achieved without living cells. Suitable strands were inserted, by means of biotech process­es, into yeast cells. Once connected together inside the yeast cells, these products were extracted and transferred into the bacterium E. coli for suitable multiplication. These products, now about 10,000 base pairs long, were screened to find those with the desired order of base pairs. The selected ones were then inserted back into yeast in order to obtain strands 100,000 base pairs long. Eventually a genome of 1.1 million base pairs was inserted into the related species of M. capricolum from which its own genome had been removed.

The bad news was that the system did not work! It took three months for the scientists to discover that one base pair out of 1.1 million had been inadvertently deleted. The miss­ing letter was from an important gene for initiating DNA rep­lication (copying). Once the mistake was corrected, the cells with the new genetic information worked just fine.

How awesome then, is the One who created life from scratch!←↰⤒🔗

So what did Dr. Venter achieve? He managed to copy in­formation already invented by the Creator. Did Dr. V synthet­ically create life? Indeed he did not. He simply demonstrated how the information in the genetic material is like computer software (which is always produced by intelligence).

He did not invent this information. He merely copied it (with the help of some living yeast and bacterial cells). Then he inserted this information into a suitable living cell which exhibits all the multiple operating systems which make life processes possible. The DNA on its own does nothing. The tol­erance of the cell for mistakes in the DNA is obviously small, in some cases, when one missing letter prevents the system from operating at all. The massive use of computers demonstrates the amazing scope of the project. Man's best ef­forts may be able to imitate some aspects of the initial design, but they will never create life "from scratch." Craig Venter's achievement really just demonstrates the awesome majesty of the real Creator of life.