In September 2007 I was the keynote speaker at The Molecular Convergence Conference at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa. As I’m a lifelong lover of science fiction, I titled my talk “Science Fiction Becoming Science Fact”. Advances are now coming thick and fast. The exponential growth of information in many branches of science is at this point, iconic, and the most rapidly expanding field is genetics. A prominent researcher in the subfield of synthetic biology notes “We are surfing an exponential now with the capacity to impact the world in a fundamental way”.1
“Surfing an exponential” is a high-powered metaphor connoting the torrent of new information that now seems to be appearing monthly. Many scientists correctly point to the potentially extraordinary impact that breakthroughs in genetics may yield. An open question is the nature of the interface between social responsibility and the path of science.
Scientists engaged in basic research loathe questions related to applications for their work. A colleague of mine is a world-renowned particle physicist and best-selling author. She rebuffs such inquiries by asking whether the questioner is aware that our ubiquitous GPS devices are a direct application of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. “Do you think Einstein thought about GPS?” she adds, burying the hatchet a little deeper.
Science cannot be checked. To predetermine boundary conditions for a path of research is to doom that research to insignificance. The most brilliant breakthroughs have almost uniformly been serendipitous. One idea leads to another. The chain of associations cannot be predicted.
Right now, genetics is “riding giants”. One-hundred foot waves are crashing the shoreline. Wang et al are “expediting the design and evolution of organisms”.2 In E. coli they created more than 4.3 billion combinatorial genetic variants per day. Lartigue et al reported work that is equally remarkable. They transferred “a genome between branches of life”, devising a sophisticated end-around to the challenge of manipulating a bacterium’s genetic code.3 Lartigue et al moved a bacterial genome into yeast, a eukaryote containing built-in machinery to conduct genetic alterations, and then moved the altered DNA back into a bacterium. They term these processes “genome transplantation”. I hadn’t heard that phrase before and I literally sat bolt upright in my chair and unconsciously took in a very deep breath. I knew very clearly that my eyes had just scanned THE FUTURE.
Whenever such a sequence is performed the result is a novel organism, a strain that had not previously existed. They “engineered a bacterial cell by altering its genome outside of its native cellular environment”. And they’re saying all this with a straight face.
The organization BioBricks has been described as enabling “open-source biology”. That’s it, exactly. Linux is robust because of constant improvements. Wikipedia has achieved world domination by being an open platform. The open-source approach enabled a team of students to build a murine vaccine for H. pylori from scratch.
More complex artificial life forms will arise with only a few more exponential turns of the development cycle. The next step is to create a novel bacterium that can reproduce. Such an event will mark the beginning of post-human society for human genetic manipulation will not be far behind.
As I’ve consistently noted, bioethics cannot play catch-up. Society needs to be prepared for revolutionary — not evolutionary — changes in our most basic comprehension of what it is to be a human being. Complex issues need to be addressed, investigated, and debated in public forums across the country. As a nation, if we don’t start to think right away, now, we will be lost. Other nations not encumbered by our Puritanism, such as China and India, will rapidly embrace the new genetics and eventually America will be no more than a memory.
1Specter M: Where will synthetic biology lead us? The New Yorker, September 28, 2009
2Wang HH, et al: Programming cells by multiplex genome engineering and accelerated evolution. Nature 460:894-898, 2009
3Lartigue C, et al: Creating bacterial strains from genomes that have been cloned and engineered in yeast. Science 325(5948):1693-1696, 2009
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