If imitation is the highest form of flattery, what then are we to make of Dr. Craig Venter’s recent stab at God? La Jolla’s own mad scientist and crew might just give the Big Guy a run for his money, raising all sorts of moral crises, ethical dilemmas and plumbings of faith.
Team Venter shook the scientific world last week with its announcement of the first successfully synthesized self-replicating bacterium. The bacterium in question ““ a chimeric copy of Mycoplasma mycoides, genomically synthesized and injected into a recipient cell ““ has a new nickname (Synthia) and an even louder reputation (the first synthetic life form).
Like Mary Shelley’s pithy Prometheus, our Dr. Venterstein has done what was once the sole domain of the gods ““ that is, creating new life. A product of synthetic genomic engineering, Synthia is perhaps the first creature since Jesus to lack proper earthly parents.
The DNA she bears was not written by God or nature, but by our Craig and his cronies at the J. Craig Venter Institute, on a computer. Somewhere in her genome lie some James Joyce quotes and an e-mail address, coded in the language of life itself.
Critics are quick to point out that the good doctor did not build Synthia from scratch. This explains the words of second-year behavioral neuroscience student Christian Frese, who dismissed it as little more than “putting a new operating system on your computer.”
This, of course, is a feat even the CLICC Lab is all too capable of accomplishing; is the Venter lab any more deft? To be sure, our Craig did recycle 3 billion years’ worth of natural life, sculpting his Synthia after a pre-existing genome and molding it into a pre-existing cell. If not rivaling God, it certainly plagiarized.
Indeed, it took Team Venter 15 years to do half as good a job as did God in the duration of a sentence. Theists of the creationist or intelligent design persuasion need not fear any erosion of their beliefs at the hands of secular science. Venter is, after all, as intelligent a designer as you can get, and Synthia has the unique position of being the first definitely designed living organism. Perhaps we are all but infinitesimal bacteria, festering in the petri dish of an even greater divine Scientist in the Sky.
But proponents of creationism and intelligent design (I know you’re out there) ought not see this as a victory. Though hardly proof for abiogenesis or natural selection, Venter’s little science project betrays the utter, banal normalcy of what might otherwise evince the divine. That life’s most inner clockwork can be constructed on a computer ““ and be injected into a donor cell to produce a viable organism ““ confirms that the stuff of life is not miracles, but chemicals. There is nothing miraculous, no vital essence, no Promethean spark. To that end we have divorced the transcendent from the natural, the superstitious from the scientific.
As should be expected from an organization losing day by day its claim to authority, the Catholic Church has spoken out with hesitant applause but patent reprimand, dealing mostly with ethics. Given its recent track record, it is hard to take serious the Church’s moral counsel, but I do grant there are some ethical quandaries to consider. (Bioterrorism comes to mind.)
The usual “playing God” complaints are almost guaranteed, naturally. For the faithful, synthetic life is more than just a breach of copyright; there are many serious questions to be asked, such as, at what point does God inject a soul into man’s creation? (Perhaps in vitro conception.) Do the dead, unbaptized synthetic go to laboratory limbo? (Or petri dish purgatory?) Are the synthetic guilty of original sin?
Of course, God has never been a legitimate part of the scientific method, nor should he guide its application. Playing God was our first and greatest sin, and I see no reason to stop. Was man meant to glimpse such cosmic truths? With the proper regulations in place to keep us from destroying ourselves, there’s no reason not to. And somehow I can’t help but detect sarcasm when I hear Andrew Lewis, a fifth-year political science student and self-professed Catholic, tell me the scientists “should stop immediately and find the nearest church.”
While I’m loath to signing off with another man’s words, I am on a roll with rhetorical questions, and the indelible stylings of molecular biologist James Watson resound powerfully: “If we don’t play God, who will?”
What hath science wrought?
Cry about it to Manalastas at jmanalastas@media.ucla.edu.
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