Headlines, North America

SCIENCE: US-Backed Researcher Scours Seas for Matter to Create Life

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Aug 19 2004 (IPS) - Somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean, a private research vessel owned by controversial genetic scientist J Craig Venter is collecting millions of bacteria from the sea, hoping to find the biological building blocks he can use to create a synthetic life-form that will one day become a new source of energy.

As fantastic as it sounds, U.S. scientists, including Venter, have already created such life forms from bits of DNA, the building blocks of the cells that make up all living things.

For instance, in 2002, geneticists at the State University of New York manufactured a polio virus. While that effort took years, Venter assembled a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria – in less than two weeks late last year.

The process is called synthetic biology or nano-biotechnology, and uses pieces of DNA and individual molecules to build what are in essence living machines.

Venter and his peers are scouring the planet for bacteria that are much more efficient than known varieties at converting sunlight and biological matter into energy, the basis for the alternative energy source “biomass,” which turns agricultural and other biological waste into fuel.

The DNA of those “super” bacteria would then provide the blueprint for the living machines.

Creating the artificial bacteriophage involved making copies of segments of DNA from a real bacteriophage and putting them together inside a bacterial cell. The artificial bacteriophage looks and behaves just like the natural one: it has the ability to infect and kill bacterial cells and is indistinguishable from its “real” counterpart.

A bacteriophage is a very simple life form, with just 5,000 base pairs in its genome or genetic map. (By contrast, the human genome has three billion base pairs.) Bacteria have roughly four million base pairs, and creating an artificial one will be much, much more complicated.

But there are those who believe it can be done. And, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) thinks Venter is the scientist for the job.

Last year the DOE gave Venter’s organisation, the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA), nine million dollars to create artificial organisms that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to produce biological energy sources.

“With this advance,” Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham said in a statement, “it is easier to imagine, in the not-too-distant future, a colony of specially designed microbes living within the emission-control system of a coal-fired plant, consuming its pollution and its carbon dioxide, or employing microbes to radically reduce water pollution or to reduce the toxic effects of radioactive waste.”

But other observers see a more frightening future.

“The creation of new life-forms has enormous implications for all humankind,” says Silvia Ribeiro of the environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO) ETC Group.

“This is potentially much riskier than GM (genetically modified) crops. Releasing completely new forms of life into the world might open a Pandora’s box,” she told IPS from her Mexico City office.

“There should be an open, public debate about this.”

IBEA did not reply to IPS’ requests for an interview.

Brewster Kneen, a Canadian writer and biotechnology critic, sees Venter’s quest as more of the U.S. government’s continuing promotion of biotechnology as the solution to all problems. “Rather than making real efforts to deal with the sources of pollutants, they try to distract people with this ‘magic bullet’ thinking,” he said in an interview.

Serious problems such as climate change need attention now, added Kneen, publisher of ‘The Ram’s Horn’, a journal of food systems analysis, but Washington has done little to reduce U.S. emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming, nor has it signed the Kyoto Accord – an international treaty designed to cut emissions.

David Caron, a marine biologist at the University of Southern California (USC), says Venter’s project has the potential to solve some environmental problems but is a very long-term proposition. “We can’t even guess what they’ll find,” he told IPS.

An expert on marine microorganisms, Caron says bacterial diversity is nearly limitless and therefore has great potential to contribute to the development of useful products. For those reasons and to better understand marine ecology, many other scientists are looking at ocean bacteria, but on a smaller scale than Venter, he added.

The biologist supports this type of research and is working with other scientists at USC to one day deploy millions of microscopic robots or “nano-bots” in the ocean to monitor outbreaks of toxic algae. The project will take at least a decade to achieve, if it ever succeeds, but Caron points out that in the 1960s the idea of the Internet seemed far-fetched to many people.

Yet the world is anteing up for nano-technology. Investment in it will total 8.6 billion dollars in 2004, and the U.S. government will contribute 3.7 billion dollars into “nano” research over the next four years, New York-based Lux Research Inc announced Tuesday.

Tiny robots are less of a concern than putting artificial life forms, which might reproduce or mutate, into the environment, says Sheldon Krimsky, professor of environmental policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts State.

Creating new life-forms from the bottom up will not make them any safer than current biotechnologies, says Krimsky, who has written several books on the subject. “The chemical industry creates its products that way and has had a phenomenal history of mistakes.”

One major reason for those errors, which include PCBs – toxic chemicals used as coolants and in electrical products and that are released into the environment as by-products of incineration – results from a simplistic view of biology when, in fact, all living things co-exist in a complex ecosystem of inter-relationships, Krimsky said in an interview.

Synthetic biology, he argues, fits into the same model of linear thinking that believes creating life is just a matter of putting the right biological building blocks together.

Researchers are creating life forms without any public or governmental oversight, adds Krimsky, and that shows no sign of changing, he said. “Until products are ready to leave the labs, there will be no public attention on this issue.”

ETC Group’s Ribeiro and members of other civil society organisations that met at the first Americas Social Forum in Quito, Ecuador in July say they are now trying to increase public awareness. They have also agreed to create a network to track Venter’s work and to discuss its implications.

They are also concerned about possible patents of life forms, although Venter has signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) or other agreements with countries where he has taken bacteria samples.

But such deals have not been subject to debate nor have the terms been made available publicly despite Venter’s assurances they would be, says Ribeiro.

According to Chilean activist Camila Montecinos, “there is nothing in the MOU with Chile or the Galapagos to prevent monopoly patent claims on any commercially useful results derived from our collected diversity.”

“We are profoundly troubled by the potential of Venter or others to privatise microbes found in our region,” she added in a statement issued by Spain-based organisation GRAIN, an NGO that promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control of genetic resources and local knowledge.

Ribeiro said many delegates at the Quito forum were calling Venter’s project the ‘mother of all bio-piracies’ and were extremely worried about the dangers inherent in creating entirely new forms of life. “Doing this is both dangerous and arrogant,” she says. “Is this the kind of science we need in the world today?”