It was described as a scientific earthquake, but Craig Venter was just a fraction more modest in summing up his team’s biotechnology milestone in May. His synthetic bacterium was, he said, “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”
The company’s ultimate goal is to create a stripped-down cellular chassis with just enough biological machinery for independent life. Non-essential DNA regions from the synthetic genome will be whittled away until it is as concise as possible to sustain life. The result will be “a new vision of cells as understandable machines comprised of biological parts of known function.”
Some bioethicists interpreted this ambitious vision as a “God is dead” moment. Julian Savulescu, of Oxford University, declared breathlessly that Venter was becoming “a god: creating artificial life that could never have existed naturally, creating life from the ground up using basic building blocks.” And the best-known bioethicist in the US, Arthur Caplan, ranked it with Darwin and Copernicus. “Venter’s achievement would seem to extinguish the argument that life requires a special force or power to exist,” he said. “In my view, this makes it one of the most important scientific achievements in the history of mankind.” BioEdge, WSJ
See also: The Perils of Creating Synthetic Life
President issues a letter re: Synthetic life
Venter not the first scientist to "play God"
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