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Created the first synthetic cell …

Posted on May 29, 2010 by dawn

Craig Venter, the pioneer of the genome, has taken another momentous step in the history of science, with what could be a major scientific achievements of the story: the creation of artificial life.
Venter and his team of scientists in fact produced in the laboratory for the first time a cell, that of a bacterium that can live its own life and reproduce.
Venter has set his discovery “synthetic cell.” Pave the way for the creation of vaccines and biofuels in a completely artificial. Venter, during a press conference yesterday, said that the cell is “the first species capable of self that we had on the planet where the parent is a computer.”
Many scientists claim the damage that they achieved a great technical achievement with this operation, a huge chunk of DNA synthesizing and replacing that of a cell. However, many critics saying that this approach is too slow and that it will take years and years before being able to design new organisms. On the other hand instead of conventional genetic engineering is making significant progress in the field of biofuels.
Scientists have manipulated DNA or parts of DNA for decades, but the technical capacity to create life offers an amazing new instrument of power of man over nature.
“This is literally a tipping point in the relationship between man and nature,” said molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University.
With this achievement is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria, and later on new plants and animals, be designed on a computer and then made and grown in a laboratory. In terms of relationship between man and nature could be for the twenty-first century what the atomic bomb was to the twentieth.
In the short term you can already imagine that synthetic biology will help to produce better medicines, gathered more consistent and less polluting fuels. In the long run, the limits are imagination and ethics.
It will take long before you get to design the forms of life on a laptop but, writes the Economist, it is inevitable that sooner or later happen. For two reasons: the extraordinary speed and falling costs in analyzing DNA sequences and obtaining synthetic DNA. After years and millions of dollars needed to decode a sequence of DNA, now just a few days and a few hundred million. Worldwide grow excessively databases containing genomes of all life, from small virus to the tallest trees. And the fact that synthesize DNA has become faster and faster means that soon anyone can buy a synthesized DNA.

Obama Calls opinion Bioethics Committee – Following the creation of ad first synthetic bacterial cell, the U.S. president Barack Obama has asked the Committee on Bioethics White House to draw up an experiment and study on issues raised by ” synthetic biology “, and to deliver a report within six months. Writes the New York Times that Obama said that new developments raise “genuine concerns”, without specifying which.
The reactions to research conducted by American biologist J. Craig Venter were also opposite in sign: some have praised the success of its work, others have reduced their scope, others advance of ethical concerns, many point out the obvious mingling of scientific interest and commercial research of Venter.