• Question: what are your views about other scientist making synthetic life?

    Asked by microcoolio to Darren, Deuan, Duncan, Lori-An, Michelle on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Darren Nesbeth

      Darren Nesbeth answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I try not to get too jealous and just concentrate on my own work.

    • Photo: Duncan Hull

      Duncan Hull answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      I think the recent example that got widely reported in the news was a little over exaggerated – but it is an interesting and important problem that many people are working on.

      It could, for example, help us to provide some solutions to pressing environmental problems like climate change, food security (being able to grow enough food to feed the world) and energy security (being able to meet the growing energy demands of an ever expanding global population)

    • Photo: Michelle Hudson-Shore

      Michelle Hudson-Shore answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I think that this is in its very early stages. But if it developed so that we could produce a synthetic lifeform that didn’t have the capacity to suffer and could be used to test the new drugs on instead of animals then I would be in favour. I do think that how it develops and how it might be used should be carefully monitored.

    • Photo: Lori-An Etherington

      Lori-An Etherington answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Craig Venter and his team of scientists have been accused of ‘playing God’ in creating life that would never have existed naturally, in the form of a bacteria. On the other side of the arguement technology such as this has been proposed by Venter to help with making biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines. I can see both sides of the arguement and whilst creating bacteria seems harmless and beneficial in may ways, I find it a bit scary that this may theoretically open the door to being capable of creating sentient lifeforms (not in the near future though) which I would find harder to agree with

    • Photo: Deuan Jones

      Deuan Jones answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      My response copied from another question…

      Craig Venter and his team copied the DNA from one bacteria with some small modifications. Then they took another bacterial cell removed it’s own DNA and placed the DNA they had copied into the cell. It lived.

      There’s a lot of nonsense being spoken about this in newspapers and interviews saying that Venter has created artificial life or that we’re going to become gods. The truth is that despite incredible advances in our understanding of living cells over the last 50 years, the creation of life remains beyond us. And I’m quite happy about that.

      The Scientific American magazine ran an article describing Craig Venter as the Lady Gaga of science – an over the top drama queen who just wasnt to promote himself.

      The work is technically brilliant, but it’s just another small advance like millions of scientists make around the world. It doesn’t help us in any way understand how life was created because this is just an artificial process. Prestending you’ve created something from scratch when you started with two cells in my view is bad scientific practice and bad communication.

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