Brave new world

The breakthrough work done by Craig Venter and his team that takes the second step to creating synthetic life is truly amazing.  Never before have we been so close to radical change in the way we live, work and interact with our environment.  The potential for this research to be used for everything from cleaning up the planet to replacing fossil fuels to curing disease should not be underestimated.

As with every new development, there are a number of critics, all claiming that he's trying to play god, setting up an environment in which a madman will be able to use the technology for evil etc.  This will inevitably happen whenever something new and different comes along. 

Generally, scientists working with DNA synthesis liken the progress of work to that of computer chips, with cost falling swiftly while capability escalates.  One of the main potential benefits from this research, would be to identify the building blocks required for life.  The genome they've used for the experiment has only 485 genes, the smallest number for a known living organism.  They think that some of these are unnecessary for life, but don't know which ones.  The synthetic living organism will allow them to experiment with these genes and so discover the most basic building blocks of life.

The final, and most challenging step in creating synthetic life, is to insert the artificially created chromosome into a living microbe, and have it take over the organisms functioning, and be capable of self-replicating.  The team believe that this goal is within their reach in the coming year.

The website for his research institute states:

"Synthetically produced organisms with reduced or reoriented metabolic needs will enable new, powerful and more direct methods of bio-engineered industrial production. We believe that a synthetic chromosome, and eventually a synthetic cell, will become an integral tool for the energy, chemical and pharmaceutical industries."

More info on the current work can be found in the published paper here, or for the less technically minded, here.

Worthy goals.  We'll have to keep watching...