Genetics boffins on the verge of artificial bacteria

Good old bioethics experts

Its great that they're concerned, and after all it is kinda what they're there for. But They should be pretty ashamed that the only good reason they have for being concerned is that it might have terrorist applications.

Terrorists of any kind are incredibly unlikely to be able to create their own super plagues using this method. They'd have more luck assembling, say, some smallpox virus... but even this requires significant amounts of expertise and equipment. It is about as likely as a terrorist nuclear weapons program.

The only people who can do this sort of thing are governments, and when they do it, it is *warfare* then, surely? Oh no, that sort of nation is a 'terrorist state'.

It is a pretty sorry state of affairs when people have to tick the terrorist box just to get noticed. Won't somebody, please, think of the terrorists?

Patenting Genes

This reminds me of that book 'Next' by Michael Crichton. Gene patenting and so forth. How patentable are these things?

Capn. Bacterium?

I'm always a bit skeptical when reading news from other people's fields. Is this guy the Biotech world's equivalent of Captain Cyborg, or is this really a breakthrough?

It's all coming up roses...

So "Venter is betting on artificial organisms delivering a bonanza for medicine, renewable energy, and anti-climate change efforts"? Break out the champagne! It's the end of history! *cue naff muzak* It is the dawning of the age of Aquarius...

So Venter wouldn't dream of making billions for him and his investors by selling this kind of tech to, say, Pentagon contractors? As if! He has a heart of gold! And there is no way that this could all go horribly wrong by manufactured organisms escaping into the wild and causing an ecological catastrophe. We all know how secure commercial and govt. biotech sites are after all *coughpurbrightcough*

And even if they did escape these bugs will have had their DNA coded so well that they couldn't possibly cause any problems. Right? I mean how hard can it be to code the DNA of an original organism so that it behaves in a predictable fashion in every situation? No more difficult than coding an OS like, say, Windoze - another triumph of monopoly capitalism - and we all know that that never goes wrong in the wild but only in the sad deluded imaginations of Linux lunatics...

There are bioethics experts?

Where are these bioethics experts? I keep seeing their views cited, but I don't see the experts themselves. The closest I see are hoards of self-declared bioethics experts on blogs, lacking regulation or certification and of widely varying level of biological knowledge from the professional gene-tinkerer to the complete crackpot. Even the more credible experts rarely agree with each other over the most basic of issues.

As a sceptical agnostic..

..I have to ask whether he's in danger of getting sued by God on grounds of prior art, or whatever lawyers call it?

Ahem

Just to be clear; they haven't 'made' anything, all they've done is copy something that already existed (admittedly, the lab technique is difficult) and change it. If I photocopy the Mona Lisa and give her glasses and a moustache with a marker pen, have I 'made' a great masterpiece?

In order to be able to claim they made any kind of life, they'd have to meet the conditions that used to be imposed for making functionally-equivalent BIOS chips without getting sued i.e. build it from scratch *never having seen the original code*. I'd submit this is something we'll never see done in a lab.

Missed the boat. Again.

Once more, the various ethicists are left standing dockside as the technology boat sails over the horizon. One might think that after so many years of playing 'catch up,' ethicists would start talking *seriously* about the ethics of various technologies *before* they become viable? But no - the scientists have stolen another march whilst the ethicists are busy still debating sealing wax.

@Anonymous Coward

"with none of the extra genes that might possibly be used for defense against other organisms, or offense in infectious processes"

Haven't followed this and know nothing about genetics, but doesn't that assume one already knows the purpose/effect of each gene (either alone or in combination)?

And, 28 days later in unrelated news,

We have suddenly lost contact with the UK. No news agencies are answering the phone, the Prime Minister is incommunicado and the Queen has not been answering any calls from diplomatic channels.

We are at a loss to explain what has happened. US spy satellites gather some sporadic activity, and some cities are burning, but it's as if there is no intelligence left.

NATO is discussing the possibility of sending in a low-altitude survey craft, but somehow the various parties have not reached an agreement yet.

There is no such word as if

OK, so we have a scooped out bacterium with only the minimal genes for survival, like a blank sheet? so pump in some other genes from somewhere else and you'll have something new, this is going to happen.

Some of the new things will be bad for us, there's good bugs and bad bugs, some we can tollerate and some we can't, this will also happen.

Labs have leaks, this has happened before, it will happen again.

There is no question that [we] will create something bad that will escape into the wild, this will happen over and over again.

When this happens we will either survive it or not, and this assumes that this is an accident and this technology is not funded or purchased by people with less than altruistic intentions.

Related story

Heard on NPR recently about a scientist trying to increase the lifespan of certain worms via genetic manipulation. The scary part was when they said they were making changes in the worm's genome, *at random*, and then looking for the effect. That they seem to have had some success in achieving their goal of longer living worms just made it all the scarier.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1258582