Life 2.0

As long as researchers depend on the genomes of existing organisms to begin building new ones, progress will be hindered to a certain extent. The reason: evolved DNA is a mess of overlapping segments and junk that has no purpose scientists can fathom—and there's no user manual. When genetic engineers go in and tinker with these confusing genomes, they often can't be sure of the outcome of their work. "Screw it," MIT SynBio scientist Drew Endy told Wired magazine. "Let's build new biological systems; systems that are easier to understand because we made them that way."

As a first step, Endy chose to design and construct a synthetic bacterial virus modeled after a natural one named T7, which was already well understood. Unlike T7, the synthetic virus (christened T7.1) was stripped of unnecessary complexity in both design and function—it was reorganized to be sleek and efficient with 57 separate genes encoded in a 40,000-letter-long genome. And although its code was just a distant, unnatural facsimile of nature's creation, T7.1 still behaves like a virus, infecting and reproducing inside bacterial cells.

Viruses and biodevices can't reproduce on their own—they need to hijack a cell. What SynBio scientists are aching to get their hands on is a trimmed-down and simplified version of a whole cell, containing only genes required to power self-maintenance and replication. Every reduction in complexity is likely to yield a biological system that is easier to understand and manipulate, as well as one that has more surplus energy available to devote to making or doing something useful. Based on detailed analysis, Church believes that a genome designed with just 151 specific genes laid out along 113,000 letters of DNA will be sufficient to produce a cell that can reproduce by itself. He reckons he's 80 percent of the way to creating it.

Not all scientists agree that SynBio will work. (A minority that holds strong religious beliefs voices the greatest skepticism.) Francis Collins, the director of the American portion of the Human Genome Project, is a bitter opponent of Venter's free-wheeling approach to biotechnology (the two men were forced to accept equal credit for completing the human-genome sequence on the White House lawn with Bill Clinton). "I find it very hard to believe that, starting from scratch, we can somehow come up with a better [biological] system—one that's going to have much success," he said in an interview with Nova. Leon Kass, former chairman of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, thinks SynBio will fail at a more basic level. Scientists, he says, are "inherently incapable of understanding life as lived—not only by human beings, but by any living thing."

Like most biologists, SynBio practitioners have a more materialist view of life. "Life is not magic," says Princeton's Ron Weiss, an electrical engineer who now concentrates on genetic programming of cells. He thinks older biologists like Kass have not kept up with advances in science. Of course, SynBio scientists haven't quite proven that a cell is a kind of biochemical machine, and religious biologists like Kass and Collins hang on tightly to this uncertainty. Proof will come when the first discrete, self-maintaining, self-replicating, stable organic creature—Life 2.0—is created from scratch in the lab.

Proof won't deter criticism from outside the scientific community. The idea that only God can create life is arguably even more fundamental to Judeo-Christian dogma than the 17th-century notion that Earth was at the center of the universe. Pope Benedict XVI has expressed outrage at scientists who "modify the very grammar of life as planned and willed by God." The pope elaborated in an address in 2006: "To take God's place, without being God, is insane arrogance, a risky and dangerous venture." Green activists echo this disdain. "Synthetic biology is like genetic engineering on steroids," warns Greenpeace representative Doreen Stabinsky.