Craig Venter’s synthetic life and its implications

If you haven’t watched Craig Venter’s Synthetic Life videos yet, you must!  This is one of those historic moments like the invention of transistor which led to today’s computers.  There’s a lot of controversy and speculation around this concept.  I think some people don’t understand the implications of this technology.

This breakthrough has philosophical as well as practical implications.  Life is treated like any other machine.  It is stored in digital media, and then produced to come alive again.

In about 10-20 years, life has become the domain of engineering from something beyond, something untouchable.  I think, this last invention really is the killer app of all times, and perhaps human history.  I’m serious about this.  It’s probably even bigger than computer revolution.  Because, for the first time in the history of earth, and probably the whole universe, a discontinuation in life’s chain has occurred.  A cell without a parent cell has been born.  As Venter puts it, ‘a cell whose parent is a computer’.  This means, life was created by just putting the right chemicals in the right order.  There was no magical ‘life force’, no special ‘touch’ from above.  It was human designed computer and just chemicals to start with.  Well, the information came from a real cell.  But it came as ‘information’ only, not in any physical form.  So a living being was created only based on the data in the computer.  You can imagine, that data could also be manipulated before it is printed out and inject into a cell.

Venter’s team printed out a full DNA from a yeast cell and injected it into a living empty cell.  The cellular machinery booted up and started functioning just like a normal cell, but it was using the manufactured artificial DNA.   Although the information contained in the DNA was mostly the same as the original yeast, Venter’s team also encoded some signature into it so it can be identified and used as a verification that the technology worked.  They even put their names, and an email to contact if someone decodes the special signature sequence.  The technique they used prevents those encoded extra data from being treated as protein formula and is just ignored.

Now, I’m an engineer, not a biologist, but I think I can see some interesting uses other than the usual stuff that everyone talks about.  Since I’m not in a position to actually implement any of these, I’ll use my freedom to improvise without current technical limitations, assuming they will sooner or later be overcome.

1. Just like computer publishing, this will open up an accelerated new era of biological engineering.  You can easily modify genes in the computer and probably even simulate what they’ll produce once the necessary cellular machinery is fully understood.  You can basically design living things and once you like the design, you can just print out the DNA and produce the living being.  There’s no limit to what you could design, but probably the first things will be, medicine, custom made bacteria to do environmental cleanup, reversal of pollution, or produce cheap fuel.  Then the bigger projects will slowly start appearing:  custom made plants that were designed by accelerated evolutionary algorithms on super computers.  I’m not sure how long it will take until they can design a custom made human being.  But they can start by simulating crossing in computer environment to produce custom made animals.  I think, we’ll need real big supercomputers to simulate evolutionary algorithms for complex animals.

2. You could scan the DNA of each different tissue in your body as it is now, and store it in digital media.  When you have any illness, or when you get old, just print the previously taken DNA’s to generate any tissue in your body.  This could even create a whole new industry of life extension.

3. Use this technology for interstellar travel.  Instead of sending mature humans, just send digitally encoded DNA sets for humans and all the animals, plants and bacteria to create a biosphere from just ‘information’ once a small ship reaches its destination.  Or just send machines to produce cells, and beam the information up.  Until the ship gets to its destination, we’ll have enough time to design life that’s adapt to the final destination.

4. Send such ships to many star systems, search for life, or produce life.  Hey, maybe that’s how it all started on earth!  But that’s a separate discussion..

5. Beam living things in long distance. But it’s not like the teleportation in Start Trek or ‘The Fly’ because the original copy is not lost.

6. You can pretty much replicate whole living things if you can scan all cells, or at least the necessary minimum.  Only, you have to figure out how to assemble the produced tissues.

7. Design DNA based cellular machines that do not try to survive, but instead compute.  You could pretty much produce any cellular machinery that will do some computation and run many such computations in parallel.   Real massive parallelism as taught by mother nature.

Some say this technology can wipe out humanity. OK, but wait, an asteroid could wipe out humanity as well.  Unless we can somehow go to space and unchain ourselves from earthbound life, we’ll be waiting for our killer asteroid with our name on it.  How about human made other technologies?  How about environmental disasters or climate change that may also have a dramatic impact on human future.  All technology has good and bad uses.  But mother nature is the most graceful friend and sometimes the most cruel enemy of man.  This type of technological advancement can and should help humanity survive both its own failures and mother nature’s wrath.  There will come a day, when almost all people benefit from it, but still continue to discuss whether it’s good or bad.