Scientists launch proposal to create synthetic human genome
by Tim Radford and Nicola Davis, Guardian:
Twenty years after scientists learned to ‘read’ the human genome, scientists are hoping to write their own synthetic version of the DNA recipe for life.
Two decades ago we learned to “read” the human genome – the entire three-billion-letter DNA recipe for life coiled in the human chromosomes. Now scientists want to start writing it.
A $100 million global consortium has been proposed, to devise ways to assemble human DNA in the laboratory so as to better understand how it works, and look for new ways of treating disease and saving lives.
So far, the scientists in question haven’t the technology, the money, or the public support. But a proposal launched in the journal Science, led by Jef Boeke of the New York University Langone Medical Centre and colleagues, aims explicitly to tell citizens and taxpayers what they hope to do, and why, and encourage public interest and involvement.
The original project to sequence the entire human genome was conceived 30 years ago as a slow, costly, once-only mission: biology’s version of the Apollo moon landings. The full sequence was published in in 2003.
But dramatic advances in robotics, computing and molecular biology now mean that biologists have astonishing amounts of information not just about what DNA spells out for conception, development, reproduction and disease in humans, but in hundreds of microbes, crop plants, laboratory and domestic animals, reptiles and insects. They can sequence DNA, analyse it, and edit it in relatively small lengths. They have been manipulating DNA in the biotechnology industry for 40 years.
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