PARIS: From Frankenstein’s monster to “Blade Runner” replicants, the prospect of assembling life from inert matter has long tantalised the imagination with hope and fear.

The alluring but unsettling goal of artificial life comes a step closer with Thursday’s announcement by the American maverick Craig Venter, opening what experts predict will be a fierce debate on medical, ethical and safety issues.

Venter’s team, reporting in the US journal Science, stripped down a species of tiny microbe, Mycoplasma genitalium, to the barest genetic components to support life.

They then replicated strips of the germ’s DNA code using lab chemicals and reassembled these sections to make a synthetic, pared-down version of the original, which they called M. genitalium JCVI-1.0.

The paper is a bio-engineering exploit, showing that the toolkit and knowledge exist for making the world’s first man-made species of micro-organism a goal that Venter, a consummate self-promoter, sketched last year to a media frenzy.

He says artificial bugs hold the key to solving innumerable problems, including the world’s energy crisis and climate-change peril.

Other voices, in science and also religion, say that so far Venter is way short of his goal, for cut-and-paste of DNA does not constitute the making of life.

Even so specialists say that, outside the lab, the world is totally unprepared for the looming dawn of synbio, as synthetic biology is called.

“If you were to poll people on synthetic biology, you would be hard put to find one in a thousand who had heard of it,” Nigel Cameron, president of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, said last year.

Even governments and international organisations charged with monitoring and regulating major new technologies are in the dark about this new field, he said.

A canvassing of ethicists last October, when Venter trailed his ambition to create a brand-new microbe species to be called M. laboratorium, revealed several areas of concerns.

ETC, a Canadian watchdog group that uncovered Venter’s patent application for M. laboratorium, worries about accountability.

“Synthetic biology is advancing at breakneck pace in the absence of any public debate or regulatory oversight,” said ETC’s Hope Shand.

“It needs to be considered by a much wider public before it is allowed to progress further,” she said.

Ownership of synthetic life forms is another big problem area.

“You have a new, and potentially very powerful platform for producing chemicals, fuels, drugs and other things. This raises a number of monopoly issues,” said Jim Thomas, also of ETC, adding that some experts have predicted a fifth of all chemicals could be made through synthetic biology by 2015.

A third concern is safety, which Cameron said is likelier than ethics to prompt any government ban.

“Synbio could wind up giving enormous asymmetrical power to people who are not as well intentioned as Venter to build bugs” such as anthrax, smallpox or some as-yet undreamed of toxin, said Cameron.

Another question is the impact from releasing man-made bugs into the environment. Green activists say there could be unknown consequences if novel genes mix with soil bacteria and other species.

“He (Venter) dreams of making bacteria which for instance will clean up oil spills,” Jean-Claude Ameisen, chairman of the ethics committee at France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm), said on Thursday.

“If the idea is to release them into the wild, the same issues will arise as with genetically-modified crops.” Venter himself appears to have sought to address some of the ethical and regulatory concerns by issuing a kind of white paper with recommendations for policymakers.

But watchdog groups are not buying. They want national government and international organisations to take the lead.

How governments respond to the challenge of synbio will be a central question of the 21st century, said Cameron.

“(The rows over) genetically modified organisms and stem cells are only a small sample of what is going to happen if we can’t find a way to bring tech policy into the heart of our politics,” he said.—AFP