Should We Synthesize A Human Genome?
By Drew Endy and Laurie Zoloth,
DSpace@MIT
| 05. 10. 2016
At Harvard today an invitation-only group of mostly scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, ~150 in total, met to discuss if and how to synthesize from scratch an entire human genome – the heritable genetic material that in nature is transferred from parents to children. The meeting was originally organized to focus on “deliverables and industry involvement” with the primary goal of the project being “to synthesize a complete human genome in a cell line within a period of ten years.”
Synthesis refers to the construction of a genome starting from simple chemicals. Such a synthetic genome could then be tested in a laboratory by replacing the existing genome within a human cell. All this would still be far removed from making a synthetic human. However, the possibility of making a human cell whose genome is realized from only digital information and raw materials should trigger broader considerations.
...
Returning to our primary question, just because something becomes possible, how should we determine if it is ethical to proceed?
Continue reading at DSpace@MIT...
Image via Flikr/University of Michigan School of Natural...
Related Articles
By Meagan Parrish, PharmaVoice | 10.10.2025
When CEO Ben Lamm steps into the spotlight, it’s usually to talk about his efforts bringing extinct animals back to life. Once a far-flung idea, Lamm and the company he heads, Colossal Biosciences, have proven they can pull it off...
By Daniel Hildebrand, The Humanist | 10.01.2025
When most people hear the word eugenics, they think of dusty history textbooks and black-and-white photographs: forced sterilizations in the early 20th century, pseudoscientific charts measuring skulls, the language of “fitness” used to justify violence and exclusion. It feels like...
By Alondra Nelson, Science | 09.11.2025
In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months have made visible the stakes of the unchecked use...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
