JIM COLLINS quoted in Nature.com – on the announcement by the Craig Venter Institute that a synthesized genome had been assembled, modified and implanted into a DNA-free bacterial shell to make a self-replicating bacterium, an event the press has greeted with lurid headlines and romantic hyperbole (e.g., the Financial Times: ‘Beyond Evolution: The idea of breathing life into inanimate matter has been an enduring theme in fiction for centuries. Now it is fact as well.’):

Relax — media reports hyping this as a significant, alarming step forward in the creation of artificial forms of life can be discounted. The work reported by Venter and his colleagues is an important advance in our ability to re-engineer organisms; it does not represent the making of new life from scratch.

“The microorganism reported by the Venter team is synthetic in the sense that its DNA is synthesized, not in that a new life form has been created. Its genome is a stitched-together copy of the DNA of an organism that exists in nature, with a few small tweaks thrown in.

“Researchers in synthetic biology are designing and constructing non-natural biological circuits out of proteins, genes and other bits of DNA, and are using these circuits to rewire and repro- gram organisms. But they are small in scale, consisting of only two to ten genes, which pales in comparison to the hundreds or thousands of genes making up a living cell. It turns out that it is very hard to design even a two-gene network that performs in the way that you would like. Biology is messy and complicated, and often gets in the way of clever engineering….

“Frankly, scientists do not know enough about biology to create life.”

Continued, with other contrasting views, at Nature.com [.pdf] | A Nature.com digest is here | W.E. Garrett Fisher’s report on H.C. Bastian is here in the Fortnightly Review | More Chronicle & Notices.