Playing God in the Laboratory
When the famous physicist Richard Feynman died in 1988, one of his last letters on his large blackboard at the California Institute of Technology was: "What I cannot create, I do not understand". Geneticist Craig Venter apparently took the statement to mean "I don't really understand something until I can replicate it myself". When he completely replaced the genome of a mycoplasma bacterium with newly synthesized DNA in 2010, he encoded, among other things, Feynman's quotation into the genome. Unfortunately, he falsified the original to "What I cannot build, I cannot understand" - a mistake he later corrected.
Some hailed Venter's milestone as the creation of the first synthetic life form, although the geneticist had essentially just recreated an existing genome with a few modifications and implanted it in a related organism. Others argue that true "artificial life" means nothing less than the complete redesign of a functioning cell, including metabolic pathways and energy production. Back then it still sounded very utopian.
But that is exactly what many scientists around the world are now working on, including several German scientists such as Petra Schwille at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, Joachim Spatz at the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg and Tobias Erb at the MPI for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg. Our cover story from p. 12 gives an overview of the current state of research in the exciting field of synthetic biology, which has rapidly gained momentum in recent years. It has even been traded as a hot candidate for the EU's next flagship project with funding of one billion euros; however, this complex program now seems to be discontinued.
The follow-up article on p. 20 describes a remarkable application of synthetic biology. Some researchers are currently rewriting the genome of the bacterium Escherichia coli in such a way that viruses can no longer infect these cells. This would be an important advance for the biotech industry, which uses such bacteria on a large scale to produce drugs and other active substances. The target is now within range; the logical next step is to make human cells virus-resistant as well. That would bring with it completely different scientific and ethical problems - but also the possibility that future generations could better protect themselves from the dangerous cell pirates.
Best regards, Hartwig Hanser
