-
-
- Incredible research published in the current issue of
the journal Science is receiving much attention in the media and in churches,
schools and offices around the world. The issue is the creation of life
in the laboratory. And the reactions range from excitement to ethical outrage
to horror at the new potential for bioterrorism.
-
- Scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR)
in Rockville, Md., published the details of their effort to isolate the
minimum number of genes an organism needs to survive. They report on a
project in which they aim to create a kind of life form by building each
bit of the genetic code for a type of simple bacterium called mycoplasma
in the laboratory, then stacking the bits together like toy blocks. At
the end of the effort, the scientists can prove not only that the bits
of genetic information they stack together can be artificially ìanimatedî
into acting just like any other bacterium, but also that the most important
parts of bacteria and viruses can be synthesized at will in a laboratory.
-
- This research has ethicists scratching their heads. In
our Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, a group of
theologians and ethicists were asked to participate in an unprecedented
effort to guide the researchers as they worked toward their goal. We met
many times and learned all about the research, and ultimately published
our own approach to the ethical issues in the TIGR project in the same
issue of Science.
-
- THE LIMITATIONS
-
- We pointed out that there are profound limits to what
the TIGR method can accomplish.
-
- For example, while the researchers may have identified
the means to build a virus with a minimum complement of genes that would
allow it to perform the same tasks, the researchers have come nowhere near
making a more complex organism, even an amoeba.
-
- Much of the machinery of life, if it can be called machinery,
is the slimy stuff outside and around the DNA in the nucleus. It will be
a while before this work results in synthetic embryos of even the most
basic, single-celled organisms. And to get there, scientists will have
to learn to synthesize many more of the components of cellular life.
-
- But it can happen. It will. For ethicists and society,
the puzzle is to identify how scientists should proceed, and for what reasons
they might have to slow down.
-
- OUTBREAKS VIA E-MAIL?
-
- The possible implications of this research can be downright
terrifying. In little vials we see in movies like ìOutbreak,î
a few tiny bits of the most deadly viruses of our time are stored for research.
Behind steel doors, frozen, with mighty ventilation and filtration systems,
bits of anthrax, smallpox and countless biological variants of these viruses
are kept for analysis at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
-
- Iím really glad they sit there behind lock and
key, and I bet you share my fear that the repository of viruses in the
former Soviet Union is sometimes imperiled by fighting and political turmoil.
Lots of folks would just as soon see our last bits of deadly virus eliminated.
-
- Guess what? The TIGR research opens the door to a whole
new problem: viral hacking. Who needs to find a tiny sample of smallpox,
when you can synthesize it from scratch on a $1,000 iMac connected to a
$10,000 gene synthesizer? If viruses can be manipulated and created by
the TIGR technology, their genetic codes can also be e-mailed around the
world and built from innocuous lab materials using the same technology.
-
- Ethicists are not the right people to puzzle about this
problem. The TIGR research opens a whole new world of biological terrorism.
We will have to think fast to stay ahead of the power to make a virus.
There is reason to be cautious indeed.
-
- The Center for Bioethicsí Glenn McGeeís
most recent book is Pragmatic Bioethics.
|
