And he has applied for a patent, as synthetic life could have a huge number of industrial applications. His company, Synthetic Genomics, recently partnered with energy giant BP to make fuels such as ethanol or hydrogen from coal or oil: "potential to provide all the transportation fuel we need in the US," says Venter.
What Venter has done is to take a very simple bacterium with 470 genes, Mycoplasma genitalium, and knock out each of them to find the minimum needed to sustain life. Apparently there are 381 of these. Theoretically a string of DNA with these genes can be synthesised and placed inside a "ghost cell" consisting of a membrane and some cell machinery. Voila! -- Synthia, as the bug has been dubbed.
But artificial life sends shivers up and down the spine of some ethicists and scientists. The ETC Group, a Canadian watchdog organisation spotted Venter's patent application recently and has asked him to withdraw it as contrary to public morality and safety. There are areas where mankind should not meddle, it says. "We don't own life, life owns us," says Margaret Somerville, a Canadian bioethicist.
But there are more down to earth reasons, as well. Bioterrorists could create pathogens. Or a patent on a synthetic organism could make Venter's company the "Microbesoft" of synthetic biology, according to ETC. ~ Economist, Jun 16; Business Week, June 25
The UK's leading medical research group says that creating hybrid embryos from empty animal eggs and human genetic material is "vital" for the fight against disease. As usual, media reports stressed that the resulting cell would be 99.9% human and only 0.1% animal. "There are no substantive ethical or moral reasons not to proceed with research on human embryos containing animal material under the [current] framework of regulatory control," says Professor Martin Bobrow, a spokesman for the Academy of Medical Sciences.
The Academy's support for the Blair government's overhaul of fertility legislation was essentially old news. However, astonishingly, Professor Bobrow also advocated creating true hybrids by mixing human and animal gametes. (These would be destroyed within 14 days, of course, as is currently the practice.) This scenario, when mooted by opponents of therapeutic cloning, has consistently been ridiculed as an absurd fantasy by science journalists and researchers. However, it is clearly on the Academy's agenda.
"We found no current scientific reasons to generate 'true' hybrid embryos by mixing human and animal gametes," the report said. "However, given the speed of this field of research, the working group could not rule out the emergence of scientifically valid reasons in the future." This may be the first time that this controversial possibility has been flagged publicly by a leading scientist.
The report prepares the ground for these developments by dismissing ethical objections against human-animal hybrids. For one thing, it is not contrary to human dignity, because human dignity this does not exist. The Academy seems to have been paging through Peter Singer's ruminations on "speciesism": "On a more fundamental level, we judge it unlikely that 'human dignity'... derives simply from species membership. If the concept of 'human dignity' has content, it is because there are factors of form, function or behaviour that confer such dignity or command respect.
"Either hybrid creatures would also possess these factors or they would not. If they do possess these factors, they would also have a specific type of dignity analogous or identical to human dignity that other creatures lack; if not, they would not. Either way, the distinction between creatures that possess dignity and those that do not remains as it is now," says the report.
Dipping their toes into the "wisdom of repugance" debate, the Academy dismisses the notion of "unnaturalness" as a reason for banning hybrids. "Not only is it very difficult to specify what unnatural' means, but it is not clear why 'unnaturalness' should be bad; IVF is an 'unnatural' process, but it has few contemporary opponents. Vaccination and antibiotic therapy, and nearly all of modern medicine, represent a scientifically informed intervention in nature." ~ BBC, Jun 17
DISGUSTING!
America's culture wars appear to be invading the world's most prestigious scientific journal, Nature. The lead editorial in the June 14 issue is a combative rebuttal of an op-ed in the New York Times by US Senator Sam Brownback. In it he contended that evolution provided welcome insights into nature. But, he said, it had to be rejected if it undermined the notion that man is made in the image and likeness of God, as it says in the book of Genesis.
Poppycock, says Nature. "The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is not atheistic theology. It is unassailable fact." Discoveries in the new sciences of human behaviour also show that the origin of the human mind is to be found by studying biological and cultural evolution.
Not content to let the matter rest there, Nature commissioned a freelance science journalist, Dan Jones, to survey evidence that many moral judgements stem from visceral reactions of disgust. According to Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser, disgust is a sensation that has an adaptive value in the face of natural selection; it enables distinctions between an in-group and an out-group, us and them. Disgust fosters greater cohesion within groups. "Where core disgust is the guardian of the body, moral disgust acts as the guardian of the social body -- that's when disgust shows its ugliest side," says a psychologist of disgust, Jonathan Haidt, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
And who shows more irrational disgust? Here's where Nature lobs its culture war grenades into the trenches of the enemy. According to psychologists from Yale and Cornell Universities, interviewed by Jones, it is "conservatives", notably opponents of abortion, gay rights, cloning and stem-cell research. Questionnnaires apparently show that self- identified liberals are motivated largely by the empathetic and rational virtues of concern for harming others and for fairness. Conservatives, on the other hand, while they, too, had these motivations, are also influenced by more primitive-sounding emotions of group loyalty, respect for authority and spiritual purity.
Disgust is more or less synonymous with "repugnance" and Jones gleefully deploys this recent research to pull the rug from under America's best-known "conservative" bioethicist, Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. Kass coined the phrase "the wisdom of repugnance" and used it to question the case for cloning. "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder," he wrote.
Primitive stuff, it seems. According to Jorge Moll, a Brazilian cognitive neuroscientist, disgust, and presumably repugnance, reside in the lateral and medial orbitofrontal cortex. What we need to do is cultivate the liberal virtues of tolerance and empathy to counteract "the toxic effects of disgust". ~ New York Times, May 31; Nature, June 14
NEW BOOK ON INDIAN GENDER-CIDE
Penguin India has just released a book by activist Gita Aravamudan on the country's increasingly skewed sex ratio. She says that she was goaded into writing Disappearing Daughters by the realisation that it was a problem amongst the rich and educated, and not just amongst the poor.
"I realised that infanticide happened not in pockets, among the poor and disempowered but foeticide happened among the rich, the powerful, the educated; those who were aware of family planning!" she told the newspaper The Hindu.
"I started delving and was shocked by what I found. There was a deep link between female foeticide and factors like wealth, education, success of family planning, and medical progress. All these factors actually worked against women; this shocking realisation was the genesis of the book."
She hopes to reach doctors through the book. She claims that doctors are part of the problem, even if they do not recognise it. ~ The Hindu, May 27; Penguin India website
NOVEL CASES IN MEDICAL ETHICS
From Tamil Nadu, in southern India comes news of a 15-year-old whiz kid surgeon. Dhileepan Raj successfully performed a Caesarean section under the watchful eyes of his doctor-parents. The proud father, Dr Murugesan, played a video of his lad at work to shocked colleagues at a medical meeting.
Dr Murugesan's first reaction seems to have been to defend himself. Why not, he asked, when a 10-year-old can drive a car for setting a record and a 15-year-old can become a doctor in the US. (Never heard that one before.) The local medical council is thinking of deregistering Dr Murugesan. However, Dr Murugesan now claims that he did the operation himself and his son only looked on. ~ NewIndPress.com, Jun 20
IN BRIEF: primate cloning; McSurgery; correction
Primate cloning: An American scientist has announced that he has been able to perform therapeutic cloning with a rhesus monkey. If this is confirmed, it would be first time that anyone has successfully cloned a primate. The news, from the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, in Cairns, Australia, excited scientists who believe that this foreshadows the possibility of human cloning. ~ news.com.au, Jun 19
McSurgery: British cosmetic surgeon are worried by an invasion of cowboy operators who offer Botox, face peels and laser treatment. They spoke out in response to news that a New Zealand company, Appearance Medicine, is setting up franchises. "It's a McDonald's franchise approach to cosmetic surgery," said one doctor. ~ Independent, Jun 17
Correction: The author of a stem cell paper promising a ground- breaking advance in adult stem cells has had to issue a correction of a paper in Nature. Catherine Verfaillie, formerly of the University of Minnesota, and now at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, acted after investigations by New Scientist, UM, and Nature. It turns out that some of the figure data were flawed, although the conclusions still seem to be valid. Verfaillie says that she cannot explain how the errors happened. ~ Nature, Jun 14
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Artificial life is around the corner, says gene pioneer Craig Venter. His project of creating a "minimal bacterial genome" is only weeks or months away from completion. He calls it "one of the bright milestones in history, changing our conceptual view of life".