ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND, December 19, 2005: Work on the world’s first human-made species is well under way at a research complex in Rockville, Md., and scientists in Canada have been quietly conducting experiments to help bring such a creature to life. Robert Holt, head of sequencing for the Genome Science Centre at the University of British Columbia, is leading efforts at his Vancouver lab to play a key role in the production of the first synthetic life form — a microbe made from scratch. The project is being spearheaded by U.S. scientist Craig Venter, who gained fame in his former job as head of Celera Genomics, which completed a privately-owned map of the human genome in 2000. Dr. Venter, 59, has since shifted his focus from determining the chemical sequences that encode life to trying to design and build it: “We’re going from reading to writing the genetic code,” he said in an interview.
The work is an extreme example of a burgeoning new field in science known as synthetic biology. It relies on advances in computer technology that permit the easy assembly of the chemical bits, known as nucleotides, that make up DNA. Several scientific groups are trying to make genes that do not exist in nature, in hopes of constructing microbes that perform useful tasks, such as producing industrial chemicals, clean energy or drugs. Dr. Venter and his colleagues are pushing the technology to its limits by trying to put together an entirely synthetic genome.
But even if the team can assemble all of the bacteria’s 500,000 DNA chemicals (roughly 35,000 has been the record so far), no one knows if the organism will be viable. Will simply synthesizing a chemical sequence spark life? “Nobody has ever done it before so absolutely it is a key hurdle,” Dr. Venter said. “So the profound problem is what do you do with this DNA once you get it? How do you turn it into an actual organism? You need the genome to encode and make the organism. “But the way biology works, you need the organism to make the genome.”