From Discovery News, here’s a startling dispatch from the ethereal cutting edge of biochemistry and genetics. Experts predict that in three to 10 years, scientists will be able to create artificial life. And they don’t mean a computer simulation of a living thing, but what is known in the game as “wet” artificial life — that is, an actual functioning cell, complete with its genetic system, fashioned from previously nonliving chemical components.
"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," says Mark Bedau, a professor of philosophy and humanities at Reed College in Oregon who also doubles as the chief operating officer of ProtoLife, an Italian company that is one of the groups striving to be the first to create wet artificial life. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."
In the article, Bedau describes the three major obstacles to creating a synthetic cell. Scientists must create a membrane, the selectively permeable barrier that allows substances to leave and enter the cell and communicates with other cells. They also must create a genetic system that enables the cell to mutate and reproduce in response to the environment, and a metabolism — that is, the process that extracts fuel from food and changes it into energy.
Jack W. Szostak, a professor of genetics at Harvard and a researcher for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is another entrant in the race to create life. He and two colleagues recently published a scientific article, “Synthesizing Life,” in which they argue that advances in directed evolution and membrane biophysics now make the creation of an artificial cells “an imaginable goal.” The Web site of the Protocell Assembly project at Los Alamos National Laboratory is even more sanguine: “The question is not whether new simple life-forms can be assembled, but under which conditions it can occur.”
“Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," says Bedau in the Discovery News article. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."
Or not. Synthetic biologists are likely to encounter vehement opposition from religious leaders. Pope Benedict XVI recently condemned efforts to “modify the very grammar of life as planned and willed by God” and attacked “insane, risky and dangerous” science that he described as attempting to "take God's place without being God."
In his Bioethics.net blog Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, empathizes with the pope’s concerns, but nevertheless concludes: “it is a grave, grave mistake to argue that we must put all forms of genetic engineering off limits. Too much good will be lost. Our only hope of combating some of the worst pests and plagues that beset us and will torment our grandchildren is through genetic manipulation and engineering. The genetic revolution you and I are witnessing is humankind's last, best hope since it offers the prospect of more and safer food; the repair and elimination of genetic maladies like Tay-Sachs, juvenile diabetes, sickle cell disease, and hemophilia; the conquest of TB, malaria, avian flu, SARS, HIV, and many other plagues. And it will allow us to rebuild broken, worn out, or injured body parts.”
