FROM THE INTELLIGENT DESIGN DEPARTMENT:

Synthetic Life: Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines (W. Wayt Gibbs, 4/31/04, Scientific American)

This nascent field has three major goals: One, learn about life by building it, rather than by tearing it apart. Two, make genetic engineering worthy of its name--a discipline that continuously improves by standardizing its previous creations and recombining them to make new and more sophisticated systems. And three, stretch the boundaries of life and of machines until the two overlap to yield truly programmable organisms. Already TNT-detecting and artemisinin-producing microbes seem within reach. The current prototypes are relatively primitive, but the vision is undeniably grand: think of it as Life, version 2.0.

The roots of synthetic biology extend back 15 years to pioneering work by Steven A. Benner and Peter G. Schultz. In 1989 Benner led a team at ETH Zurich that created DNA containing two artificial genetic "letters" in addition to the four that appear in life as we know it. He and others have since invented several varieties of artificially enhanced DNA. So far no one has made genes from altered DNA that are functional--transcribed to RNA and then translated to protein form--within living cells. Just within the past year, however, Schultz's group at the Scripps Research Institute developed cells (containing normal DNA) that generate unnatural amino acids and string them together to make novel proteins.

Benner and other "old school" synthetic biologists see artificial genetics as a way to explore basic questions, such as how life got started on earth and what forms it may take elsewhere in the universe.

Since this is The Age of Irony, let's assume they realize that synthetic biology is redundant.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 11, 2004 1:47 PM