Craig Venter stands in front of tall plastic sacks breeding algae for biofuel.
Credit: Sandy Huffaher
IT WAS THE BIGGEST science news story of the year - possibly the decade. In May 2010, Craig Venter and his team of scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland and San Diego, California, published a study in the U.S. journal Science announcing that they had created a new bacterial species.
It instantly generated a media frenzy and propelled the terms 'synthetic biology' and 'genomic engineering' into water cooler conversations the world over.
Venter, the maverick scientist who helped drive the sequencing of the human genome in 2000 was back in the news, this time with an even bigger bang: "Scientist creates synthetic life!" and "Venter plays God!" the headlines shrieked.
The new species, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, was quickly given the more media-friendly name of 'Synthia', while reporters questioned the wisdom of creating life and what it would mean if this new technology got into the wrong hands.
In fact, the process described in Science had little to do with 'creating life'. Synthia wasn't even a wholly new genome, as you might expect from the headlines, but was instead derived from a naturally occurring bacterium - with some minor modifications (mostly the addition of identifying markers plus some gene deletions and mutations).
The aim of the Venter team wasn't just to create a new species, to play God, or even to astound the scientific community (though they did that), but to build a prototype for a microscopic production line.
Back in May, here is what the team had to say in Science:
If the methods described here can be generalised, design, synthesis, assembly and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology … the approach we have developed should be applicable to the synthesis and transplantation of more novel genomes as genome design progresses.
So, if a microorganism could be engineered to include genes that direct the cell to do a number of functions, it would be possible to use this cell for a range of industrial tasks, such as making proteins or carbohydrates or any compounds to order, depending on demand. Theoretically, it might be possible to make biofuels, vaccines, drugs, foodstuffs and anything else genetic engineers can program the new genomes to produce.
What Venter's team really set out to do, and achieved, was show it's possible to build the world's smallest production line, inside the world's smallest factory.
Venter was not so much playing God, but following in the tradition of the great industrial pioneers of last century. He's closer to a latter day Henry Ford - the man who in the 1910s developed the production line that eventually put a car in almost every home in the Western world and became the de novo engineering tool for the mass production of everything from ice cream to tweezers.
What happens next depends on how Venter and others working in this new field can tool up this tiny production line.
