When J. Craig Venter announced at a news conference the other day that he and his co-workers had created the first “synthetic cell,” he displayed the savvy graciousness of an actor accepting an Academy Award.
Dr. Venter, the renowned genome wrassler and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, praised his two dozen team members and described the long years of struggle that preceded their moment of triumph. He called out important figures in the audience: his editor, his literary agent, the celebrity diet doctor Dean Ornish. And he acknowledged that none of his group’s work would have been possible without a lot of help from the parents — Mother Nature and Father Time.
After all, that stalwart pair was responsible for designing and gradually refining the real cells that brought the Venter team’s synthetic constructs to life. There is, as yet, no escaping the cell. Every past and present lodger on the twisted bristlecone tree of life is built of cells, every cell is a microcosm of life, and neither the Venter team nor anybody else has come close to recreating the cell from scratch. If anything, the new report underscores how dependent biologists remain on its encapsulated power.
As reported in the journal Science on May 20 to international attention, the Venter team managed to recreate with bottled chemicals the entire genetic code of one species of bacterium and transplant that manufactured genome into the housing of a closely related species of bacterium. Once installed, the synthetic DNA began operating like the real thing, prompting its cellular surroundings to produce a protein work force appropriate to its needs rather than that of the original bacterial host, to copy the synthetic DNA, and to do what all bacteria love to do, which is divide over and over again.
The researchers now have many descendants of that founding microbial construct stored in a freezer, all of them nearly indistinguishable from what you’d get if you cultivated the “donor” bacterium naturally. Only on looking carefully at the genetic sequence in each cell would you find the researchers’ distinguishing “watermarks,” brief chemical messages inserted into the otherwise plagiarized string of one million-plus letters of bacterial DNA.
The harmless nucleic interjections include encrypted versions of the researchers’ names and three apt if self-conscious quotations: “See things not as they are, but as they might be,” from a biography of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer; “What I cannot build, I cannot understand,” by Richard Feynman; and “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life,” by James Joyce, which, when taken together with the fact that the physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the fundamental particles of the atomic nucleus “quarks” after a line in Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” suggests that scientists are at least as fond of the nougaty Irish novelist as is the average English major.
Other researchers were impressed by the work but were quick to keep the feat on the ground. “There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a major achievement,” said Steen Rasmussen, a professor of physics at the University of Southern Denmark who works in the field of synthetic biology. “But is it artificial life? Of course not.”
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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: The New York Times
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