WASHINGTON — Scientists on Thursday announced a bold step in the enduring quest to create artificial life. They’ve produced a living cell powered by man-made DNA.
While such work can invoke images of Frankenstein-like scientific tinkering, it also is stimulating hopes it could eventually lead to new fuels, better ways to clean polluted water, faster vaccine production and more.
Is it really an artificial life- form? The inventors call it the world’s first synthetic cell, although this initial step is more a re-creation of existing life — changing one simple type of bacterium into another — than a built-from-scratch kind.
But Maryland genome-mapping pioneer J. Craig Venter said his team’s project paves the way for the ultimate, much harder goal: designing organisms that work differently from the way nature intended for a wide range of uses. Already he’s working with ExxonMobil in hopes of turning algae into fuel.
“This is the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer,” Venter told reporters.
The report, published today in the journal Science, is triggering excitement in this growing field of synthetic biology.
“It’s been a long time coming, and it was worth the wait,” said Dr. George Church, a Harvard Medical School genetics professor. “It’s a milestone that has potential practical applications.”
Scientists for years have moved single genes and large chunks of DNA from one species to another. At his J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., and San Diego, Venter’s team aimed to go further. A few years ago, the researchers transplanted an entire natural genome — the genetic code — of one bacterium into another and watched it take over, turning a goat germ into a cattle germ.
Next, the researchers built from scratch another, smaller bacterium’s genome, using off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments.
Today’s report combines those two achievements to test a big question: Could synthetic DNA really take over and drive a living cell? Somehow, it could.
