Oliver Morton, "Biology's New Forbidden Fruit" (2005)

THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 11, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Biology's New Forbidden Fruit
By OLIVER MORTON
Lewes, England

In the early 19th century, received chemical wisdom held that organic compounds were beyond the creative powers of the laboratory's furnaces and alembics - that they could be fashioned only by the vital forces in living beings. Then, in 1828, while trying to do something else, Friedrich Wöhler discovered that urea, an organic compound of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, could be made from inorganic ingredients. His successors found that this new synthetic chemistry could produce not only all the organic molecules used in nature, but also organic molecules of which nature had never dreamed. Artificial dyes became a major industry; in World War I, so did poison gases. From plastics to detergents to fabrics to fertilizers, synthetic chemistry went on to change the world.

A similar transition is now under way in biology. Until recently biologists worked with the components they found in nature. They might swap genes from creature to creature, but they did it by cutting and pasting nature's originals, rather as an editor might move bits of prose with a click and a drag. Now the biologists are getting keyboards to go with their metaphorical mice - technologies that allow them to write genes and genomes from scratch, to alter and surpass nature's vocabulary. The scientific, commercial and destructive possibilities of this synthetic biology are easily as great as those once offered by the transformation of chemistry. But they will make themselves felt far more quickly, raising ethical and moral questions that many biologists have been poorly trained to handle.

The ability to design genomes and their components holds great practical promise. Late last year the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $42.6 million to a project at the University of California, Berkeley, that is rewriting bacterial genomes in an effort to produce the malaria drug artemisinin at a small fraction of today's costs. Companies that synthesize genes to order - send them a sequence and a credit card number and they'll mail you a gene - look to have a rosy future. To keep things safe, they check the sequences requested against databases of pathogenic genes, to make sure nobody is building anything nasty. But as the technology drops in price and spreads in availability, the possibility that someone, somewhere, will synthesize something like smallpox will grow ever greater. The genome sequences of pathogens, as of all sorts of other organisms, are piling up on the Internet.

It's a frightening prospect. But the fear needs some perspective. First, the ability to make biological weapons with cut-and-paste technologies is already widespread: diseases can easily have drug resistance engineered into them, or susceptibility to vaccines engineered out. This is hardly reassuring, especially since there is still no clear, cohesive strategy for defending ourselves against such weapons.

But synthetic biology could also make us safer. Last month, shortly after the journal Nature published an article by Dr. George M. Church of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Xiaolian Gao of the University of Houston on a technique that makes gene synthesis considerably easier, its sister journal Nature Methods published a paper by Dr. Rob Carlson at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley on a new technology endearingly known as the tadpole. Tadpoles are little bits of protein with synthetic DNA tails that promise to make the detection of all sorts of biological molecules much easier, including novel pathogens that could be used in an attack.

Both Dr. Church and the tadpole team are aware of the security implications of their work. So is the United States government. The Pentagon's research shop, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is supporting various synthetic biology initiatives. There has been some discussion of how the dangers inherent in this technology can be contained: Dr. Church, for example, has suggested that it might be possible to sequester the most powerful genome synthesis programs in a few research institutions. But the small group of people thinking about the issue has reached no consensus.

At this stage, the most important thing to do is to widen that discussion. The best basis for oversight is a concerned citizenry that wants to keep up with what is possible and discuss what is desirable. But to spur such debates in the wider public, biologists themselves will have to become more willing to think and talk about the ever more powerful technologies that they increasingly take for granted in the lab.

Biologists tend to assume that their studies are inherently, if indirectly, beneficial; they think that knowing how life works is the foundation of all medical progress, and thus a pursuit that deserves more or less unquestioning support from society at large. The dark side of their force - the potential for interrupting and subverting life that flows from biological research - rarely receives their attention. Tara O'Toole, who runs the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, remembers seeing a room full of Harvard biologists asked whether they could design a weapon that would kill people in their thousands. Their looks of bemusement - few had ever thought of such a thing - turned to looks of calculation, then to understanding, appreciation and even a touch of shock. That awareness has to be spread as wide as possible if biologists are to assume the crucial role they need to take in discussions about the future.

Suggested ways of spreading this awareness range from a Hippocratic oath for researchers to more and better courses in ethics and history. As in so much education about danger, though, the best results will come from intense conversations with peers. These concerns need to be the drivers of late-night bull sessions as much as they need to be on the syllabus.

After Hiroshima, Robert Oppenheimer told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that "in some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin." Biologists have yet to taste that knowledge, and it is not a foregone conclusion that they will. But before the trees of knowledge in their synthetic garden bear their strange fruit, the gardeners should heed the lessons of history. They should start talking to one another, and to the rest of us, about what to do when the serpent turns up.

-------------------------

Oliver Morton is a co-author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World" and a contributing editor at Wired.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company