A breakthrough as profound as the one reported this week in Science Magazine online is sure to spawn months if not years of debate and discussion.

It is “one of the most important scientific achievements in the history of mankind,” said Arthur Caplan, the bioethicist who worked for years at the University of Minnesota and now is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The news, in short, is that scientists have, for the first time, engineered a living cell that is completely controlled by man-made genes and that can reproduce on its own. This breakthrough — seen by some as advancing a challenge to the age-old notion that life can be created only by a deity or some mysterious vital force — was accomplished by genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter and colleagues at his institute which is based in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego California.

To use a scriptural metaphor, the team has not created life from “dust.” While the genome of their bacterial cell is man-made, its scaffolding is from nature. They transplanted the synthetic genome into a bacterial cell that was naturally equipped to set its genetic machinery in motion.

Still, that step was hailed as a significant advance toward creating artificial life.  

“The synthetic genome created by Venter's team is almost identical to that of a natural bacterium,” said a Science article describing the work. “It was achieved at great expense, an estimated $40 million, and effort, 20 people working for more than a decade.”

Not only did the scientists assemble the novel genome. They also built their own chemical signatures into the creation.

“So that the assembled genome would be recognizable as synthetic, four of the ordered DNA sequences contained strings of bases (the chemicals that comprise DNA) that, in code, spell out an e-mail address, the names of many of the people involved in the project, and a few famous quotations,” Science reported.

Research in Minnesota
Venter and many other “synthetic biologists” have talked for years about creating customized genomes to help make pharmaceuticals, clean up the environment and perform other tasks.

In Minnesota, synthetic biologists are inserting entirely new strings of DNA into organisms intended to help detect cancer and also to make ingredients for healing drugs, nutritional supplements and cheap biofuels.

MinnPost’s recent report on the research can be seen here.

While the stated ends for the research can be laudable, it also raises important safety concerns. It’s a good bet that the discussion following this latest news will include debates over how much regulation is needed for the research and its results.

More profound, though, are the questions is raises about what constitutes life, who should decide what forms it takes and — sure to come up — whether the work of synthetic biology is an affront to God.

MinnPost will dig deeper into those questions over the next few days.

Meanwhile, a different scientific journal, Nature, offers a range of reactions [pdf] from Caplan and other experts.

Here’s a sampling:

“A prosthetic genome hastens the day when life forms can be made entirely from nonliving materials. As such, it will revitalize perennial questions about the significance of life — what it is, why it is important and what role humans should have in its future. Although these questions are controversial and difficult to resolve, society will gain from the effort.” — Mark Bedau, professor of philosophy and humanities, Reed College, Oregon.

“This milestone and many like it should be celebrated. But has the (Venter Institute) created ‘new life’ and tested vitalism? Not really. The semi-synthetic mycobacterium is not changed from the wild state in any fundamental sense. Printing out a copy of an ancient text isn’t the same as understanding the language. ...  The grand challenge remains understanding the parts of cells that help the DNA to function.” — George Church, geneticist, Harvard Medical School.

“Venter and his colleagues have shown that the material world can be manipulated to produce what we recognize as life. In doing so they bring to an end a debate about the nature of life that has lasted thousands of years. Their achievement undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein.” - Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics, University of Pennsylvania.

“Relax — media reports hyping this as a significant, alarming step forward in the creation of artificial forms of life can be discounted. The work reported by Venter and his colleagues is an important advance in our ability to re-engineer organisms; it does not represent the making of new life from scratch.” — Jim Collins, professor of biomedical engineering, Boston University.

“The dictum of seventeenth-century physician William Harvey still holds: Omne vivum exovo — ‘All life from eggs’, meaning that all life arises from existing life. But perhaps not for much longer.” — David Deamer, professor of biomolecular engneering, University of California, Santa Cruz.