http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Artificial-life-or-plain-genetic-engineering/articleshow/5960142.cms


Artificial life or plain genetic engineering?
TNN, May 22, 2010, 12.33am IST
A day after genome pioneer J Craig Venter announced he had created 'synthetic' life, the scientific world was agog over the merits and demerits of Craig's seemingly dramatic work. Is the future actually here? The jury is still out.

Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania told Nature medical journal that Venter and his team's achievement \"undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein\".

The US government's reaction was more guarded with President Barack Obama announcing that the White House bioethics committee would submit a report within six months about the \"genuine concerns\" raised by this development.

But even back home, India's premier geneticist Dr P M Bhargava, who set up the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, was categorical that Venter, though a fine scientist, had this time around overstated his work's significance.

\"Venter's team took a cell, removed its DNA and replaced it with a host of other material. This can at best be called a massive bit of genetic engineering,\" he told TOI over telephone from Hyderabad.

Dr Bhargava's contention was simple: \"A cell has several components. If we can take each of those components separately and put them together to create life, that would be creating synthetic life. Venter's experiment is just a genetic engineering exercise.\"

His words find an echo in the reaction of Dr Steen Rasmussen from the University of Southern Denmark. In a published statement, he said, \"Implementing a synthetic genome in a modern cell is a significant milestone in understanding life today. However, the radical 'top down' genetic engineering that Venter's team has done, does not quite constitute a synthetic cell by my definition. Bottom-up researchers, like myself, aim to assemble life — including hardware and the programme — as simply as possible, even if the result is different from what we think of as life. Constructing life using different material and blueprints will teach us more about the nature of life than reproducing life as we know it.\"

The stand of the non-governmental organizations was clear as well. A statement released by the Friends of the Earth, an environmental group in the US, denounced the synthetic genome as dangerous new technology, saying that \"Mr Venter should stop all further research until sufficient regulations are in place.\"
Some NGOs felt that even the environmental uses of synthetic cells (it is hoped the bacteria, for instance, can be used to neutralize greenhouse gases) were exaggerated.

BBC quoted Dr Helen Wallace from Genewatch UK, an organization that monitors developments in genetic technologies, as saying, \"If you release new organisms into the environment, you can do more harm than good. We don't know how these organisms will behave in the environment.\"

The synthetic genome also raised some philosophical points. Mark Bedau, a professor at Reed College in Oregon, said: \"It (the new prosthetic genome) will revitalize perennial questions about the significance of life — what is it, why it is important and what role humans should have in its future.\"

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http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/812899--catholic-church-synthetic-cell-may-be-good-development-but-life-comes-from-god

Catholic Church: synthetic cell may be good development but life comes from God.
ROME—Catholic Church officials said Friday that the recently created first synthetic cell could be a positive development if correctly used, but warned scientists that only God can create life.

Vatican and Italian church officials were mostly cautious in their first reaction to the announcement from the United States that researchers had produced a living cell containing manmade DNA. They warned scientists of the ethical responsibility of scientific progress and said that the manner in which the innovation is applied in the future will be crucial.

“It’s a great scientific discovery. Now we have to understand how it will be implemented in the future,” Monsignor Rino Fisichella, the Vatican’s top bioethics official, told Associated Press Television News.

“If we ascertain that it is for the good of all, of the environment and man in it, we’ll keep the same judgment,” he said. “If, on the other hand, the use of this discovery should turn against the dignity of and respect for human life, then our judgment would change.”

Fisichella, who heads Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, stressed there is no necessary clash between science and faith.

“We look at science with great interest. But we think above all about the meaning that must be given to life,” Fisichella told state-run RAI television. “We can only reach the conclusion that we need God, the origin of life.”

Catholic Church teaching holds that human life is God’s gift, created through natural procreation between a man and woman.

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, called the synthetic cell “an interesting result” but stressed that it “must have rules, like all the things that touch on the heart of life.”

The paper said genetic engineering can do good but acts on “a very fragile terrain.”

“It’s all about combining courage with caution,” it said.

The inventors said the world’s first synthetic cell is more a re-creation of existing life — changing one simple type of bacterium into another — than a built-from-scratch kind. But genome-mapping pioneer J. Craig Venter said his team’s project paves the way for designing organisms that work differently from the way nature intended for a wide range of uses.

A top Italian cardinal, Angelo Bagnasco, said the invention is “further sign of intelligence, God’s gift to understand creation and be able to better govern it,” according to Apcom and ANSA news agencies.

“On the other hand, intelligence can never be without responsibility,” said Bagnasco, the head of the Italian bishops’ conference. “Any form of intelligence and any scientific acquisition . . . must always be measured against the ethical dimension, which has at its heart the true dignity of every person.”

Another official with the Italian bishops’ conference, Bishop Domenico Mogavero, expressed concern that scientists might be tempted to play God.

“Pretending to be God and parroting his power of creation is an enormous risk that can plunge men into a barbarity,” Mogavero told newspaper La Stampa in an interview. Scientists “should never forget that there is only one creator: God.”

“In the wrong hands, today’s development can lead tomorrow to a devastating leap in the dark,” said Mogavero, who heads the conference’s legal affairs department.

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