But it's not playing "God" it's playing nature. Philosophers of biology etc., what's the significance of this event?
To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…
5 responses to “Synthesizing a living thing in the lab”
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This is work from 2010. According to Google it has over 1300 citations so it certainly got some attention. The group used an existing cell and the synthesized DNA was based on sequence data so the sense it which this is creating life from scratch is a little attenuated. On the other hand, synthetic biology is a fascinating area and does raise philosophical questions of several different kinds.
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A friend recently posted it on FB, I didn't register it was from 2010! Thanks for noticing.
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As anyone who has tried a difficult molecular cloning project will tell you, this was an impressive technical feat, but more akin to wholly replacing a major organ/organ system in a human body than actually "creating" life from scratch. The cellular machinery needed to read the DNA was still there, in addition to the other cellular machinery required for life. I think a claim to have "created" life can be supported if/when someone can make self-replicating molecules, able to evolve and be subject to natural selection, from non-living and simple chemical progenitors.
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Technically impressive but not conceptually novel. Robert Sinsheimer and Arthur Kornberg did something like this with a bacteriophage in the late 1960s. There has been some progress on making self-replicating RNAs, which can be selected, in vitro.
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Here is the link to a recent publication which examines the societal and philosophical dimensions of synthetic biology from different perspectives: http://www.springer.com/de/book/9783319210872
I contributed the chapter: "Engineers of Life? A Critical Examination of the Concept of Life in the Debate on Synthetic Biology" and my conclusion is: The concept of life is too ambiguous and controversial to be useful for capturing the actual practice of synthetic biology. For a valid technology assessment it is certainly important to know, as concretely as possible, how synthetic biological systems behave. But the question whether this activity has to be conceived as life or not is a theoretical one. And in this context, Hegel’s famous claim that “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk” is probably true.—–
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