This paper reminds me of a saying that is well-known to pure mathematicians: "Every big discovery starts with a bad proof." This is true in mathematics. The first proof in a new subject is bad, because the discoverer is a first-rate mathematician, struggling to overcome one obstacle after another and not caring about elegance. Afterwards, second-rate mathematicians tidy up the details and find good proofs.

I think the same saying holds good in science if you replace "proof" by "experiment". This experiment, putting together a living bacterium from synthetic components, is clumsy, tedious, unoriginal. From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery. It opens the way to the new world of synthetic biology. It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life. After this, the tools will be improved and simplified, and synthesis of new creatures will become quicker and cheaper. Nobody can predict the new discoveries and surprises that the new technology will bring. I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.

II have to address one narrow point that is being discussed in the popular press and here on Edge: is Venter's technological tour de force a threat to humanity, another atom bomb in the hands of children?

No.

There is a threat, but this isn't it. If you want to worry, think about the teeming swarms of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites that all want to eat you, that are aided (as we are defended) by the powers of natural selection — we are a delectable feast, and nature will inevitably lead to opportunistic dining. That is a far, far bigger threat to Homo sapiens, since they are the product of a few billion years of evolutionary refinement, not a brief tinkering probe into creation.

Nature's constant attempts to kill us are often neglected in these kinds of discussions as a kind of omnipresent background noise. Technology sometimes seems more dangerous because it moves fast and creates novelty at an amazing pace, but again, Venter's technology isn't the big worry. It's much easier and much cheaper to take an existing, ecologically successful bug and splice in a few new genes than to create a whole new creature from scratch…and unlike the de novo synthesis of life, that's a technology that's almost within the reach of garage-bound bio-hackers, and is definitely within the capacity of many foreign and domestic institutions. Frankenstein bacteria are harmless compared to the possibilities of hijacking E. coli or a flu virus to nefarious ends.

The promise and the long-term peril of the ability to synthesize new life is that it will lead to deeper understanding of basic biology. That, to me, is the real potential here: the ability to experimentally reduce the chemistry of life to a minimum, and use it as a reductionist platform to tease apart the poorly understood substrates of life. It's a poor strategy for building a bioweapon, but a great one for understanding how biochemistry and biology work. That is the grand hope that we believe will give humanity an edge in its ongoing struggle with a dangerous nature: that we can bring forethought and deliberate, directed opposition to our fellow organisms that bring harm to us, and assistance to those that benefit us. And we need greater knowledge to do that.

Of course more knowledge brings more power, and more possibility of catastrophe. But to worry over a development that is far less immediately dangerous than, say, site-directed mutagenesis, is to have misplaced priorities and to be basically recoiling from the progress of science. We either embrace the forward rush to greater knowledge, or we stand still and die. Alea iacta est; I look forward to decades of revolutionary new ideas and discoveries and technologies. May we have many more refinements of Venter's innovation, a flowering of novel life forms, and deeper analyses of the genome.

Knowing little about genome engineering, shall I meander into more ancient precedents?

What do we remember, the first illuminated manuscript or the Gutenberg printing press? The first car or the first affordable car (Ford's model-T)? The first computer or the first popular personal computer (from Woz & Jobs)? The first 121 Edison power stations delivering direct current in 1887 or the AC electric grid from Nikola Tesla?

Do we prefer the first DNA model, Pauling's triple helix, or Watson and Crick's double helix? The first atom bomb or the last? The first authors on PCR, Kleppe in 1971, Saiki in 1985, or the innovator who brought it to practice — Kary Mullis? The first human genome in 2004 for $3 billion or the first affordable ($1500) personal genome sequence in 2009?

Returning to the topic of genome engineering, are we looking for the first construction of a tiny genome (for $40 million) or a larger genome already cranking out green chemistry? Do we applaud the first rationale for engineering whole genomes ("Because it's there" — a la George Mallory, who died climbing Everest) — or seek a more compelling and nuanced articulation — "to make virus-resistant production strains, engineering standards, safety features, new bio-polymers, mirror-chemistries, and bring the extinct back to life"?

The achievement of Craig Venter and his team is certainly a major milestone in technology, and his forecast of the stupendous benefits that may be reaped is, if anything, understated. Now we need to ask how this new technology should be regulated. There is no doubt at all that self-replicating bacteria (and other microbes) with artificial genomes could do more harm than good if they escaped our control. They will not just replicate but evolve, mutating swiftly unless we take special steps in advance to prevent this from happening, and even then there will be a risk — not large, but not ignorable — of  seeing our preventive efforts, whatever they are, being undone by mutation.  Evolution is as unrelenting as gravity, an omnipresent prevailing wind that unties the knots, unlocks the doors, seeking out every escape route as assiduously as the inmates in a prison.

At first glance, the problems seem straightforward and not insuperable. We need to apply the lessons learned in other novel technologies. Nuclear reactors are equipped with "fail safe" systems of considerable ingenuity and reliability (nothing is perfect). Like air brakes (in which the default position is ON, the pressure being provided by powerful springs, held in check by air pressure), the default position of the control rods in nuclear reactors is IN, maintained by gravity unless held OUT by positive forces.  We should equip all artificial life forms with similarly designed default DIE WITHOUT OFFSPRING mechanisms held in check by some positive contribution we can swiftly remove when we need to put the brakes on.  If artificially designed life forms can be kept exquisitely vulnerable, doomed to immediate extinction unless they get their supply of X, and we control the supply of X, we can keep them on a short leash (and if we, their controllers, get distracted or disabled in any way, they die). 

This is just one obvious step we must take, and it is probably not all that hard to achieve. Unlike the disease organisms and viruses that are proving so adept at evading our efforts to suppress them biochemically, laboratory-created life forms will not be cryptic but close to transparent: we will know a lot about them from the inside out, and all the troubles we have overcome in learning how to keep them alive will give us lots of insight into just what they need to stay alive.      

But of course such a "fail safe" system is not itself foolproof. We will want to have further provisions in force, and probably, as with nuclear materials, the main problem confronting us will be the possible roles of deliberate human sabotage, or just irresponsible human curiosity. With a technology of such power, the temptation to explore its powers informally will be ubiquitous. And here the parallel with the safeguards of nuclear technology is misleading; a more ominous parallel is with cyber-technology. Fortunately for us all, enriching fissionable material is still, more than sixty years after it was first done, a very expensive, high-tech process, not something a hobbyist can do clandestinely in his basement. Devising state-of-the-art cyberattack weapons, in contrast, can be done by smart high school kids in their bedrooms, at almost no cost. The result is that we are shockingly vulnerable to anyone who sets out to develop a large-scale cyberattack. The arms race favors offense over defense by a huge margin: it is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to develop cyberoffense than to defend against it.

Once the techniques honed by Venter and his team become widely known, will it be utterly beyond the capabilities and budgets of, say, well-trained biology majors to develop their own artificial life forms? That is not at all clear. What good will it do to have international agreements about the obligations of laboratories to equip their creations with default-apoptosis machinery if there are thousands of free-lancers engaging in bio-hacking? The price we will pay for this huge amplification of our technological prowess is probably an equal and opposite vulnerability. Welcome to the fast lane, humanity.

Seven generation sustainability is an ecological concept that urges the current generation of humans to live sustainably and work for the benefit of the seventh generation into the future.

"In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation..." — Great Law of the Iroquois

The Seventh Generation originated with the Iroquois when they thought it was appropriate to think seven generations ahead (a couple hundred years into the future) and decide whether the decisions they make today would benefit their children seven generations into the future. (Lyons O, An Iroquois Perspective.)