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bioethics - what is morally acceptable?
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| yukii |
What do you think research is or is not morally acceptable? When are scientist going too far? Is genomic manipulation wrong?
Article from NPR:
| quote: | Scientists are reporting that they have made a living cell from DNA that was originally synthesized in a lab. This isn't quite a synthetic organism. But the result is an important, and some would say troubling, step on the road to creating life in the lab.
Craig Venter is the scientist behind the effort. Many scientists have strong opinions about Venter, but even his detractors will admit he's a man who thinks big.
Venter and his team have been working to create a synthetic cell since 1995. The idea is to use the four chemical constituents of DNA — named A, T, C and G — to put together a synthetic genome. Then they would put that synthetic genome into a cell, and have it direct the cell as it grew and multiplied. Now they've succeeded.
Venter says there were two enormous hurdles to accomplishing his goals. First, he needed to figure out how to make a very big piece of DNA. Most chemical synthesis techniques stop working when you get to a few thousand DNA letters. That means you can't copy a whole genome — you have to do it in parts.
But Venter says, "We wanted to make something close to a million." Solving all the chemistry has taken much of the past 15 years.
Venter and his colleagues eventually solved this problem by putting smaller fragments of synthesized DNA first into bacterial cells, where they assembled into large fragments, and then into yeast cells that stitched those fragments together.
The second hurdle was figuring out how to transfer that large chunk of DNA into a cell without breaking it. To begin with, he wanted to show he could transfer a working chromosome from one species of bacteria to another.
Synthesizing Life
So he took the genome from a simple cell, a small bacterium called Mycoplasma mycoides, and spent several years trying to transfer its genome into a related species, Mycoplasma capricolum. He finally succeeded.
"So it was the capricolum cell, with the mycoides genome in it," says Venter.
After he cleared those two hurdles, the last step was to make an exact copy of the mycoides genome in the lab, and transfer that synthetic genome into capricolum.
It took several more years of work, including determining a more accurate DNA sequence for the mycoides genome, to get the system to work. But now, as he and colleagues report in the journal Science, they've done it.
But this isn't really a new life form, says Jim Collins, a synthetic biologist at Boston University. "Its genome is a stitched-together copy of the DNA of an organism that exists in nature."
Collins says Venter has created something remarkable, but it's not creating life.
"We don't know enough biology to create or synthesize life," says Collins. "I think we're far removed from understanding how [you would] build a truly artificial genome from scratch."
Even so, Venter's accomplishment of using DNA created in the lab to control a cell's behavior is bound to raise questions about whether the work is morally acceptable. That's a discussion bioethicists have been having for some time.
Inevitable Dilemmas
It's not as though we suddenly got to the point where particular moral questions are raised here that weren't already present in the field, says Gregory Kaebnick, a scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank.
Kaebnick says there are two basic concerns about what Venter and others in the new field of synthetic biology are doing. First, that one of these synthetic organisms will escape from the lab and run amok. And the other is whether this kind of work crosses a line where humans start playing God.
"Up until now, organisms have come into being on their own, as it were; they've evolved on their own," Kaebnick says. But, he says, Venter's work says that may not longer be the case. "And for some that's a troubling development."
But for Venter, that's exactly the point of doing the work in the first place.
"We decided that [by] writing new biological software and creating new species, we could create new species to do what we want them to do, not what they evolved to do," says Venter.
Venter has founded a company called Synthetic Genomics, where he intends to use these new species to do things like make new fuels and new vaccines.
For the moment, Venter and his colleagues are the only ones with the money and techniques to do this kind of genomic manipulation. But others are working in related areas, and a new world of synthetic microorganisms might not be far off.
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ARTICLE
C0R VERZION: Some scientists have succeeded at synthesizing genomes & could make new species, change their behaviour, and . Do you think this is morally right or wrong? Or you don't give a ? |
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| Jackson |
like this has been done on Drosophillia Fruit flies for a decade.
EDIT: actually, i've not properly read this, will do in the morning. |
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| floyd741 |
| morality, whatever advances our understanding and use of science is a good thing in my opinion. |
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| couch-potato |
| Morals? More like MORE LOLS. |
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| Marcus Summers |
| quote: | Originally posted by floyd741
morality, whatever advances our understanding and use of science is a good thing in my opinion. |
Obviously hasn't watched any zombie movies. |
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| couch-potato |
| quote: | Originally posted by Marcus Summers
Obviously hasn't watched any zombie movies. |
Obviously hasn't read any zombie survival guides. |
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| woscar |
| quote: | | Kaebnick says there are two basic concerns about what Venter and others in the new field of synthetic biology are doing. First, that one of these synthetic organisms will escape from the lab and run amok. And the other is whether this kind of work crosses a line where humans start playing God. |
It's not quite clear whether Kaebnick stated this, or if he's only citing common objections to similar situations, but it's quite comical that people still think this way. If he believes them himself, then he's quite a moron. |
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| Jackson |
| One point we could argue is that other animals have certain behaviours that they have evolved/adapted over thousands of years to benefit themselves at the expense of other creatures...they do not have moral concerns as they are unable to. So, when we get down to the bottom line, why should we be restricted by such morals? |
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| yukii |
| quote: | Originally posted by Marcus Summers
Obviously hasn't watched any zombie movies. |
iz u 4 realz? :stongue: |
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| Jackson |
| quote: | Originally posted by woscar
It's not quite clear whether Kaebnick stated this, or if he's only citing common objections to similar situations, but it's quite comical that people still think this way. |
Exactly. Introducing an alien species into an ecosystem is a massive threat! And I would be worried if this were to happen. However, genetic engineering of Fruit flies has happend for decades (Doctors at my university have told me its really easy to isolate certain strands on the genome and create a fruitfly with an extra leg on its forehead!) and as long as the same safety protocals apply then I wouldn't loose any sleep on it.
But worries about playing God??? This is not really much different from test tube babies in terms of morals. |
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| bas |
| Escape and run amok, ing lol. I say if cell manipulation can lead to extending human lives and better understanding of our world, then we as a species need to go at it full steam. There's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have master over our domain, as it were. We're the only creatures on this planet with the ability and power to do it, so we really owe it to ourselves and everything else to try. |
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| Lews |
Run amok? A little cell? The ?
Christ @ Don't play god... Because clearly extending peoples lives and being able to make new organisms is bad. |
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