Interview: Craig Venter, scientist

INSIDE the J Craig Venter Institute, tucked away in the sleepy town of Rockville, Maryland, 24 scientists were holding their breath. Within a laboratory the world's first synthetic genome – the result of 15 years of research and millions of dollars – was being transferred into a common bug. It was the moment of truth. Would the bug react, or ignore the new genetic code? But as the bug began to multiply, something remarkable began to happen. Some of its progeny began to ditch their own DNA, and use the synthetic genome.

"It's pretty stunning when you just replace the DNA software in the cell," Dr Craig Venter, the man who has dreamt of rewriting the genetic rulebook for over 30 years, said last week. "The cell instantly starts reading that new software, starts making a whole different set of proteins, and in a short while, all the characteristics of the first species disappear and a new species emerges."

And so it was that, using four bottles of chemicals, a computer, a DNA synthesiser and some common microbes, synthetic life was born. It is the first time a microbe has been created that both thrives and replicates with only a synthetic genome to guide it. Every part, or "letter" of its genetic code was man-made in the laboratory using chemicals to form an artificial chromosome one million characters long. And if there was any doubt as to the identity of its creator, 63-year-old Venter, once nicknamed Biology's Bad Boy by Fortune magazine, eradicated it by making sure the genome contained a number of blueprints. Within them are encoded the names of the researchers, a website address, a contact e-mail and several quotes, including a line from James Joyce: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."

It is perhaps typical that Venter, a Vietnam veteran from the Mormon town of Salt Lake City, Utah, would choose such a provocative, yet uplifting quote. The man who, a decade ago, competed with the Human Genome Project in a messy and public battle to complete the draft sequence first has always been a maverick member of the international science community – worth millions, with a playboy lifestyle (his second marriage was to one of his students) and the proud owner of a 95ft yacht with its own genetic research lab on board.

But last week's revelation that he had created a synthetic living cell –literally created life – has pushed Venter into the stratosphere, alternately hailed as a hero by the scientific community, and condemned by those who feel his breakthrough is somehow "playing God".

The Human Genetics Alert watchdog are not amused. "What is really dangerous is these scientists' ambitions for total and unrestrained control over nature," said director Dr David King. "Scientists' understanding of biology falls far short of their technical capabilities. We have learned to our cost the risks that gap brings, for the environment, animal welfare and human health."

Meanwhile the Vatican warned that "any form of intelligence and any scientific acquisition ... must always be measured against the ethical dimension."

Professor Sheila McLean, director of the Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine at Glasgow University, says the moral attitude that often accompanies such breakthroughs can be perplexing.

"There will always be some people for whom the attempt and the success of creating the organism will always be unethical. Yet what medicine is trying to do all the time is cure people, and it's not normally regarded as unethical for clinicians or scientists to test the boundaries of what's possible."

And, she says, critics are often too quick to jump to conclusions. "It seems to me there is a temptation to make the assumption that scientific advance necessarily has negative implications and it is the case that this kind of technology could be developed in a way that would be worrying for people," she says. "But it does seem that some of the issues that have been raised about what he's done are a kind of overuse of the precautionary principle. It does seem to be a remarkable scientific achievement that could be used for good purposes."

Professor Sir Ian Wilmut, director of the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Edinburgh University, and the man who cloned Dolly the Sheep, has been accused of playing God himself on several occasions. He is sceptical of the term.

"I'm not quite sure what it means," he says. "Is he trying to change bacteria either for research purposes or for something that is useful to us – yes he is. But does that mean he is any more trying to play God in principle than looking for changes in, say, cereals?"

So what then, does Venter's breakthrough mean for mankind? Venter himself believes it could change the way we eat, as well as the way we treat our environment.

"It's probably hard to imagine all the applications of this technology," he said. "Our view is that we're going from 6.8 billion to 9 billion people in the next 30 to 40 years, and we can't provide the food, the energy, clean water or medicines for the 6.8 billion, so we need some radical new technology to be able to do that without destroying the planet for 9 billion people."

Wilmut compares the technology as similar to that of fermentation. "As we learn more about the mechanisms that regulate cell function it may then become possible to change cells in order to give them new abilities that are useful to us," he says. "Human beings have done this in different ways for many years. Yeasts have been changed to make them more suitable for production of wine, beer or bread."

Professor Richard Kitney, co-director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College in London, knows Venter well and has been working in the same field of genetics for many years. He believes we are now around three to five years away from developing modified algae that reacts to sunlight to produce oil and oxygen.

"The key thing here is designing cells to work in a way you want them to work. If you can think of a cell like that, with inputs of sunlight and CO2 and the outputs oil and oxygen, that would be a huge benefit. It's an industrial process."

He also thinks synthetic cells can be used to grow more crops. It could be possible, he says, to use "synthetic biology techniques to modify the metabolic hardware of plants, to make them more efficient so you can increase the yield".

And he believes the same techniques can be employed in medical advances, particularly in areas such as flu vaccines. Venter has said that he hopes to be able to design artificial life forms that can quickly make vaccines on huge production scales, something that has made several drug companies sit up and listen.

"That's an area where people consider you can get a relatively early win because you have a much better handle on the way the cells react using these techniques. You can actually tell the response of cells much more accurately than with other vaccines, and it won't take the usual six months to develop a vaccine, either, which is obviously incredibly important for something like a flu vaccine."

Then there is the possibility of tackling pollution by releasing artificial micro-organisms into the atmosphere that would "eat" carbon dioxide, and creating others that would convert waste oil, remove poisonous chemicals and heavy metals from landfill sites, or even clean up dirty water.

Venter has not been slow in recognising the commercial benefits of his technology. He has already secured a deal with oil giant ExxonMobil to create algae that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel. It's a deal that could, in the long run, be worth a trillion dollars. But it is this willingness to use the technology for private financial gain that is, says McLean, at the root of many people's fears over the ethics of such a development.

"There are potential downsides to quite a lot of what science is attempting to do and the question of regulation becomes very important," she says. "Craig Venter is a person who has a very serious business going, and the thing that is of concern is whether or not the pressure to capitalise on this kind of creation would be too powerful in a situation where there's a business to be run. That's the way it's more likely to get into the wrong hands."

Venter says he has created the cell for the good of mankind, but, as McLean points out, "the man who split the atom never imagined the atom bomb." But the nightmarish scenario of man-made humans or Prince Charles's "grey goo" is still little more than the stuff of science fiction.

Venter himself has likened the current breakthroughs to that of the electronics industry in the 1940s and 1950s. "The people then building circuits probably had very little notion about BlackBerry phones or iPhones or personal computers," he said.

Wilmut, meanwhile, cautions against believing that Venter's breakthrough will solve the world's problems. "The result is a very interesting technical achievement, but it is not clear why it offers any new opportunities that were not available with existing methods of making genetic changes in bacterial cells. I do not believe that the new techniques will change our lives dramatically, certainly not in the near future."