Illustration by Mayank Chhaya
It is fair to argue against creating artificial life in a lab when we already have enough natural life flowing out of every hole on this planet. So to that extent American biologists Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison’s success in artificially creating a bacterium with no ancestor falls in the category of neither here nor there.
In terms of their technical prowess this is a stupendous achievement which might even get them the Nobel Prize. That they could write what they call “software of life” and load it onto a host is breathtaking by any measure. However, in terms of the human versus nature debate, its value is at best questionable. On a bad day nature can create something infinitely more complex seemingly out of nothing than we humans ever can. For instance, initially the biologists and their team turned to something called Mycoplasma genitalium, a creature found in the genital tracts because it is supposed to be the tiniest “free-living” bacterium.
Did you know about the kind of stuff you carry around in your pants? I did not. To think that nature has a bacterium living inside the genital tracts whose shell was thought by the three biologists as a possible place to insert their laptop generated genome!
Now that I have got my unsolicited and largely half-baked opinion out of the way, what the biologists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have done is, within the realm of human accomplishment, is truly historic.