The rights and wrongs of the Human Genome Project—Write
by Karl D Stephan, MercatorNet:
The highly prestigious journal Science carried an unusual article on June 2. Most scientific papers are about new discoveries—we figured out this theory or we measured thus-and-so in that experiment.
Well, this paper was neither of those things. In “The Human Genome Project—Write,” the 25 co-authors announced their intention to synthesize a human genome from scratch. In layman’s terms, they are saying that they are going to design a human being.
The way they plan to do this is through an organization calling itself the Center of Excellence for Engineering Biology. They plan to raise US$100 million this year pretty much any way they can: donations, private sources, government funding, you name it. So far, one of the biggest contributors reportedly is Autodesk, maker of Autocad, the computer-aided design software familiar to mechanical engineers, architects, and lots of other people who make things. Autodesk has chipped in a quarter million, and so the researchers are at least 0.25% closer to their goal.
I am dwelling on the mechanics of the plan because there is a question here of whether we are looking at science pure and simple or a scheme that would look more at home in the hands of venture capitalists.
Now there’s nothing wrong with doing science (pure or impure), and there’s nothing wrong with making money, either. But one can at least question whether a proposal that looks more like a business plan in some respects deserves to appear in the pages of a journal that usually carries things like Nobel-Prize-winning research that’s already been done.
What exactly are the authors proposing to do? Well, you may remember the original Human Genome Project. Its goal was to read a human genome, all 3-some-billion DNA base pairs of the chromosomes of a human being. In computer-science terms, every base pair encodes one bit of information, and so your chromosomal description can in principle be contained in three billion bits or so, which can easily fit on a flash drive these days. The Human Genome Project was finished around 2003 at a cost of about $3 billion, according to Wikipedia—about a dollar a base pair, it turns out.
Reading the genome is one thing, but writing it and trying to use it is quite another. If you go and synthesize this human genome, how will you know if it works unless you try to make a baby?
And that gets us into really deep ethical waters.
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