(Part way through this I realized Paul Raeburn posted on it too, next slot down. Well, it IS a story after all about duplication…)

Such a lather over life today. J. Craig Venter has succeeded in his long and extensively publicized quest to sequence – put together in the workshop – a whole bacterial genome and get it to take over the gears, levers, wheels, and riobosomes of a microbe whose own natural genome had been removed. The mash-up promptly reproduced itself a few billion times. Not only that, each copy is an exercise in immortality for the team. Venter and the gang signed it (inserted a few extra sequences spelling out their names, like watermarks), put a bunch of other stuff in there including for all I know a patent registration number, and definitely including something by another j-man,  J. Robert Oppenheimer. Maybe it includes the line about becoming death, the destroyer of worlds, an appropriately hubristic yet intellectually sublime and introspective declaration if ever there was one. I wonder if anybody has dropped a little vial of this new microbe in some local and hospitable place, figuring fragments of its genome with their names on it might survive till the Sun goes red giant.

Some outlets are entertaining the question, “Is it alive?”  What in creation does that mean? It’s an autonomous, self-replicating chemical system with genetic controls that make it capable of evolution. It has a synthetic variant of the genome of one microbial species, Mycoplasma mycoides‘s genome, plugged into a cousin, M. capricolum, that divided looking and acting just like an M. mycoides. The synthesis wasn’t entirely synthetic: yeast cells and their DNA-repair systems knit the synthesized genome chunks together. Sure it’s alive. The lab may have smelt like a brewery. What next, a debate about vitalism? The question does address the nerve that such work as this strikes in many people who usually chose other things to do than to think seriously about science. If one Googles Venter, or a few other people traveling the road to synthetic life, one can find a number of atheist-oriented sites celebrating his project as a refutation of the need for god, and some religious ones saying no it doesn’t.

Anyway, the Craig Venter Institute and another arm of his empire, Synthetic Genomics, has its success in Science magazine today where it can’t be missed (the embargo did not quite hold – details at Ivan Oransky‘s  Embargo Watch blog), and doubled down with interviews, press releases, lots of pictures. See grist for the press release.

One must, for all the sniping, congratulate the team that did this. It was difficult, industrial-scale synthesis. The effort plans to move on to much more purely invented genomes, stripped down and assignable to no specific natural species but equipped for novel jobs. One wonders whether a Congressional committee aide already has contacted the team to come to a hearing and explain where this is going and to share  thoughts on government oversight of such things. “Playing god” may come up.

*UPDATE: This is a synthetic genome, but its reception nonetheless echoes what the same group reporter three years ago when they transplanted a natural genome from one to another microbe:  Earlier Post.  Something that came up then, but not this time around that I notice, is that the researchers apparently already have a name for their new “species”: Mycoplasma laboratorium ;

Stories:

• Ottawa Citizen – Tom Spears: The definition of life just changed ; Again, what the hell is that headline about? Did Spears explain at all to the headline writer that the whole deal is that this thing satisfies the definition of life? I mean, is a rewritten newspaper article published somewhere else still a newspaper article? Criminy. The story is breathless but doesn’t have the idiocy of the headline – in fact Spears’s third graf says the “synthetic cell actually lives, according to all definitions, even though all of its genes were made in a lab with ingredients from a fancy chemistry set” and that last bit is fine news writing.
• BBC: Scientists create ‘artificial life’ , with video and audio files, Q&A, and a profile of Venter. Lots of people are saying he created “artificial” life. If one copies the neighbor’s house, is it an artificial house? Evolution created life – Venter made an extra copy, but I’m getting entirely too worked up about semantics and usage here. “Synthetic life” is a better term. That refers to how it was made. “Artificial life” is too close to “not real” as in artificial Christmas tree.
• NPR All Things Considered – Joe Palca : Scientists Reach Milestone on Way to Artificial Life ; Venter tells Joe how hard it was – and other sources tell him that hard doesn’t mean creative. That is, he didn’t create life, but he did some pretty remarkable copying. (Hmmm – if a writer just copies somebody else’s words faithfully from one book into another book, it’s plagiarism isn’t it? )
• NYTimes – Nicholas Wade: Researchers Say They Created a “Synthetic Cell” ; As Wade writes, this is just a step toward the eventual goal – not to copy an existing microbe’s genome, but to write more or less from first principles, as learned from real genomes, a new genome stripped down to essential functions and including traits that the genetic engineer might like to see, such as little, living biofuel factories. This is a solid article, with caveats and qualifications and little hyperventilation over the meaning of life. It plays deep inside, why I don’t know.  He called some of the right people, too, such as Gerald Joyce, the RNA evolution man, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla.
• *UPDATE – Wall St. Journal – Robert Lee Hotz: Scientists Create Synthetic Organism ; Missed this important outlet first time through. Well played on front page. One quibbles with calling it a synthetic cell. If one sends a construction crew a changed set of drawings for a building and they rebuild it, does that make it a synthetic building? The instructions may have been re-typed by hand, but a regular biological ribosome and other organelle things made the proteins that are in the rebuilt cell, yes?  But Lee smartly plays up sources who say it is a new and deeper era of genetic engineering we’re now entering.
• Belfast Telegraph – no byline: First ‘synthetic cell’ created ; This toss-off yarn is the one that Embargo Watch suspects broke it.
• AAAS Science News of the Week – Elizabeth Pennisi: Synthetic Genome Brings New Life to Bacterium ; Well-calibrated headline.
• Telegraph (UK) : American scientist who created artificial life denies ‘playing God… ; No byline, which is curious. Search machines show another story at the Telegraph, under the byline Tom Chivers with the hed “..is it really ‘playing God’?, but the link is dead.  Don’t know what’s going on there.
• Times of India – Subodh Varma: It’s science at work, not god or Frankenstein or magic ; Varma lays it all out in sober prose. One is unsure whether this is a “typical case of selling a scientific advance through hype,” as the story does not say who is doing the hype. Venter’s team is eager for publicity, may be varnishing over potential down sides to widespread synthesis of genomes, but is not hyping the fundamentals. Maybe it’s the media itself that is hyping it? Sure. There may be tripe there, but not hype in its usual meaning by which media fall for somebody else’s hype.
• Washington Post – David Brown: Scientists create cell based on man-made genetic instructions ; An upbeat story. Brown declares, without hiding behind a quote or source, “the experiment’s success if more symbolic than practical…it is unlikely to have any immediate effect on the biotech world…”
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Scientists create 1st bacteria strain from man-made DNA ; You’ll have to read this to see how he deftly, unexpectedly, works the gulf oil spill into his account ;
• Time Magazine – Alice Park: Scientist Creates Life. That’s a Good Thing, Right? ;  Cheeky hed, but very good explainer with some details I don’t see elsewhere.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Creation of genes in lab raises hopes, concerns ; Good reflection on the lessons of Asilomar from a man who was there, and on this achievement’s peril and promise.
• Philadelphia Inquirer – Faye Flam: First lab-created organism raises ethical questions ; Art Caplan tells her this’ll spawn a “metaphysical earthquake.” And she points out the for all the Frankenstein talk, but victim of Dr. Frakenstein’s monster was the monster, not the public.
• AP – Lauren Neeregaard:  The Quest to Create Artificial Life ; Again, that “artificial” grates a bit. The story’s solid. It includes a true, creepy, but not misleading quote from Venter about this microbe’s parent being a computer.
• Live Science – Stuart Fox: First Live Organism with Synthetic Genome Created ; Includes the contents of the “watermarks” slipped into the genome, including the paper’s authors’ names and some quotations.
• Science News – Laura Sanders: Genome from a bottle ; No foolin’ around with murky ethical or philosophical ramifications here – just what they did, whether it will pay off or not, and explanation why this falls well short of creation (rather than duplication and modification) of life.
• San Diego Union-Tribune – Gary Robbins: First synthetic cell created by scientists ; It’s a local story for the veteran and competent Robbins. It’s a decent job. Robbins’s byline there is news, too. He’s been science editor up the coast at the Orange County Register for years. Now at the ‘Trib. Things change – but he got another job in the newspaper business! He even says his new employer is hiring. It wants a web-centric biotech writer. More on his change here.
• … could go on all morning.

Grist for the Mill:

J. Craig Venter Institute Press Release ; AAAS Press Release ;

Vulgarity Alert, but wanna laugh?:

Don’t read this if you object to coarse language.

• The Daily Mash: I’d Play God, Says Everyone ;

- Charlie Petit

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