Expected in 2009: An Artificial Organism

Mark this on the list of "things to expect in 2009." Craig Venter and his team expect to create the world's first artificially synthesized organism:

One likely announcement, which may happen any day of the year, is of the world's first artificial living creature. The announcer will almost certainly be Craig Venter, an American biologist who has been working on making such a creature for over a decade. It will not be quite as billed. Mycoplasma laboratorium, as the bacterium is expected to be dubbed, will need the shell of a natural bacterium to get going. But the genes themselves will have been made and stitched together, as the name suggests, in a laboratory -- and it is the genes, not the shell, that define the organism. Someone once accused Dr Venter of playing God. His reply was, "We're not playing." And though a completely artificial life form is the ultimate in synthetic biology, 2009 will also see the widespread deployment of natural bugs that have been highly tinkered with in the creation of advanced biofuels, as well as the planting of yet more genetically modified crops. (Emphasis mine.)

Damn, that's a good line.

For further reading, Venter wrote an article in the last issue of SEED discussing his plans and challenges in the coming years. (I agree with Venter's resolve and his desire to think big, but often I think that he is misguided to believe that all science should be "big science." A lot of what scientists study has be done in much smaller, more nimble experiments addressing specific questions. But this is just quibbling...)

Anyway, I have two comments on the prospects of artificial life.

On the one hand, if they do it, it will be the most astonishing scientific advance since we split the atom. What you can get micro-organisms to do is practically limitless. Imagine solving the problems of global warming and pollution by simply cooking up a bacteria. It would be on the level of the "magic tech" that global warming activists warn us may be necessary to create a technical fix for the problem.

On the other hand, I am very skeptical about the viability of artificial organisms. It is one thing to link together a variety of genes to form novel metabolic pathways. We know what a lot of these genes do, and we could simply assemble known genes to form a novel metabolic pathway -- taking oil to sugar or vice versa, for instance.

But simply linking a lot of genes together isn't going to be enough. Genes contain regulatory sequences between them that govern when a gene is and is not expressed. Coordinating the expression of genes in a viable organism is a highly non-trivial task. You don't want the bacteria to be creating all the proteins, all of the time, or else it will be wasting spectacular amounts of energy and probably die in the process. Evolution has selected over billions of years for precise tuning and regulation of genes in any living creature. Successful regulation of genes in a novel organism is not something we should expect to work on the first try.

I expect that whatever micro-organisms they develop will at first only be viable in the most strictly controlled lab environments -- and they probably won't do anything useful. It will take a long time before we can get gene regulation correct in these organisms. (This is probably for the best anyway because it would be a disaster if one of these organisms became environmental. We simply have no idea what havoc the introduction of such a species would cause.)

Thus, I am pretty optimistic about artificial organisms, but it will take us a while to get there.