November 21, 2002
"HE WAS CONFIDENT IN HIS SCIENCE":Scientists Planning to Make New Form of Life (Justin Gillis, November 21, 2002, Washington Post)
Scientists in Rockville are to announce this morning that they plan to create a new form of life in a laboratory dish, a project that raises ethical and safety issues but also promises to illuminate the fundamental mechanics of living organisms.
J. Craig Venter, the gene scientist with a history of pulling off unlikely successes, and Hamilton O. Smith, a Nobel laureate, are behind the plan. Their intent is to create a single-celled, partially man-made organism with the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life. If the experiment works, the microscopic man-made cell will begin feeding and dividing to create a population of cells unlike any previously known to exist.
To ensure safety, Smith and Venter said the cell will be deliberately hobbled to render it incapable of infecting people; it also will be strictly confined, and designed to die if it does manage to escape into the environment.
More worrisome than the risk of escape, they acknowledged, is that the project could lay the scientific groundwork for a new generation of biological weapons, a risk that may force them to be selective about publishing technical details. But they said the project could also help advance the nation's ability to detect and counter existing biological weapons.
A bunch of folks have mailed this today, and it does seem troublesome. However, they aren't experimenting on humans (at this point), so it doesn't seem to raise any pressing moral concerns as yet. Concerns about bioengineering and cloning and the like aren't about the technology per se, but about tampering with human nature and destroying human lives in the process. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 21, 2002 12:49 PM