Over 130 scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and government officials from five continents gathered at Harvard this week for an “exploratory” meeting to discuss the topic of creating genomes from scratch including, but not limited to, those of humans, said George Church, Harvard geneticist and co-organizer of the meeting, according to a post from STAT. All the attendees were clearly instructed not to post on Twitter or contact the news media about the meeting. Some scientists are anxious that synthetic genome would be used to create human beings without biological parents. According to Times of India, the project was not aimed beforehand at creating people, just cells, and would not be restricted to human genomes.
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“They’re painting a picture which I don’t think represents the project”, Dr.
“This idea is an enormous step for the human species, and it shouldn’t be discussed only behind closed doors”, said Laurie Zoloth, a professor of religious studies, bioethics, and medical humanities at Northwestern University.
In an essay published in Cosmos Magazine, Endy and Zoloth wrote the possibility of human genome synthesis would trigger broader considerations. Would it be OK, for example, to sequence and then synthesize Einstein’s genome? They want to create synthetic human genome for which they would employ chemicals to make man-made version of all DNAs found in human chromosomes.
The organizers of the synthetic human genome project said that its scientific payoff potential is huge, and that it is a logical follow-up to the original Human Genome Project.
Can they synthesize human genome within 10 years?
“It wasn’t secret. There was nothing secret or private about it”, said Church, who told the Post that the video of the event will be released when the scientific paper is published, likely soon.
Meanwhile, Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Berkeley, California-based Center for Genetics and Society, a politically progressive organization that has had a skeptical view of biotechnology, issued a statement Friday criticizing the Harvard gathering: “If these reports are accurate, the meeting looks like a move to privatize the current conversation about heritable genetic modification”. This new project will involve not reading but writing the human genome.
The project was initially called HGP2: The Human Genome Synthesis Project, with HGP meaning Human Genome Project. With little information coming out of the 12 May meeting, all we can do is sit tight and wait for that peer-reviewed proposal to be made public, so we can see for ourselves exactly what was discussed.
As for whether it’s a frightening development, there are already so many genetic engineering tools out there that synthetic genomes probably wouldn’t be a game changer. And scientists are now debating the ethics of new technology that might allow genetic changes to be made in embryos. That requires adding not just one gene to the yeast, like to make insulin, but numerous genes in order to create an entire chemical production process within the cell.
“Right now, synthesising DNA is hard and error-prone”. Current methods may only create approximately 200 base pairs. To synthesize one of those, multiple 200-unit segments have to be spliced together.
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He said: “Our ability to understand what to build is so far behind what we can build”.
