Synthetic Biology - Brutes or Angels: Human Possibility in the Age of Biotechnology - page 281

but after the cells divided, some new cells contained only the transplanted ge-
nome. These new cells lived and reproduced perfectly well, assuming the out-
ward appearance of the donor cell. Thus, one species of organism was literally
transformed into another species solely by the swapping of DnA molecules. This
demonstrates the feasibility of creating new life forms simply by putting new, syn-
thetic genomes into cells.
9. The researchers (smith et al. 2003) synthesized the 5,386-base-pair-long
genome of a virus from scratch using commercially available chemicals. A sci-
ence news item in Science magazine (november 21, 2003, 1307) reports that “ven-
ter is convinced that he can build genomes 300,000 bases or longer.” This is still
far short of most bacterial genomes, which typically contain 1-10 million bases.
Gibson et al. 2008 details the use of living yeast cells to aid in the assembly of
human-made fragments of DnA into a complete genome for a bacterial cell. The
next step will be to show that this human-made genome is capable of transform-
ing living cells into organisms with characteristics that reflect the genetic infor-
mation in the transplanted genome. Then the stage will be set for humans to de-
sign wholly artificial genomes for transplantation and the formation of new life
forms.
10. science reporter elizabeth Pennisi (2009) explains what venter and Church
accomplished in relatively nontechnical terms and the significance of the work for
future synthetic biology. The technical report of venter's work was published in
lartigue et al. 2009.
11. see http://protocells.lanl.gov/ (accessed october 3, 2011). The Protocell
Assembly project's overarching goal is to discover conditions under which new,
simple life forms will assemble. An international repository for protocell infor-
mation is at www. protocell.org (accessed october 3, 2011).
12. see http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/szostak_bio.html (ac-
cessed october 3, 2011). This web page for Jack szostak describes his work with
protocells and his use of in vitro natural selection to create rnA molecules with
enzymatic activities.
13. Benner, hutter, and sismour write that their work is the next step in the
tradition of biomimetic chemistry, a subdiscipline of organic chemistry that at-
tempts to synthesize chemical structures different from natural, biological mole-