Claim of Having Created Synthetic Life Is Far Overblown

© 2010 Peter Free

18 June 2010

Sensationalism in presenting scientific advances is a bad idea

The perennial search for scientific funding and profit distorts the accuracy of scientific claims.  These distortions lead to what is usually science-harming and truth-destroying sensationalism.

Sensationalism is not helpful in a profoundly anti-scientific nation like the United States.

For example, good science, but much inflated rhetoric

J. Craig Venter and his colleagues claim to have created synthetic life by making a synthesized copy of the DNA from one bacterial species and inserting it into another bacterial species, with the host bacterium subsequently transforming itself into the species the copy had been based on.

The J. Craig Venter Institute's website calls this the "first self-replicating bacterial cell."

That claim of synthetic cell-making is nonsense, even though the scientific advance the claim is based on is notable and very respectable.

A valid claim of creating synthetic life would require that --

Even absent an agreed-upon ethics-based definition of "synthetic life," a common sense definition would require that:

(1) The synthetic DNA coding and sequencing not slavishly copy a known life form.

Otherwise Life has done all the work in evolutionarily stumbling upon a coding sequence and organization that can self-replicate an organism on its own.

(2) The synthesized DNA must either:

(a) code its own contents-enclosure (cell wall for bacteria) or

(b) be placed in equally novel, human-created container, rather than into the cell wall/membrane of a pre-existing life-form already known to be compatible with the inserted synthetic DNA.

Conclusion

Given the ethical implications of creating life, especially in a country as religiously absolutist as the United States, peer review scientists need to squash exaggerated claims made by over-excited/funds-seeking peers.  Objective assessments preserve the credibility of the field.

See:

For a lay presentation of the Venter Institute achievement, see Laura Sanders, Genome from A Bottle Turns One Bacterium into Another 17(13) 5-6 (19 June 2010).