The promise and perils of
synthetic biology are being grossly exaggerated, leading to fuzzy thinking
about the technology's ethical implications. Contrary to the fawning and
fainting media coverage, the creation of computer-generated chromosomes is an
incremental advance that poses no unique safety, environmental or ethical
issues beyond those debated and agreed at Asilomar in 1975.
The proximate cause of all the
hoohah is a report published in Science in which a team led by Craig
Venter described the painstaking assembly and deployment of an artificial
genome for the primitive bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. The work builds
on rapid advances in DNA sequencing and synthesis technology, as well as on
years of prior experience by Venter's team and other groups with large-scale
gene-splicing methods.