The idea of creating a synthetic human genome is somewhat different from the “conventional” genetic engineering.
A plan to create a synthetic human genome is qualitatively different from the usual edit: scientists don’t just tweak one or two of the gene, and will produce the entire DNA. In the end, biologists are not likely to contain what nature has to offer base pairs, and their ability to experiment with the organisms will increase dramatically.
After the information about the meeting was leaked to the media, geneticist George Church (George Church from Harvard, the main organizer of the meeting, hastened to reassure the public. According to him, the meeting was not synthetic to the human genome, but only the prospects for the production of long DNA strands.
However, as found by science journalist Andrew Pollack (Andrew Pollack) from the New York Times, originally the project was called “HGP2: draft synthesis of the human genome”, and in a meeting invitation clearly stated that the main objective is the synthesis of the full genome in the cell line for ten years. Only afterwards, the organizers changed the name to something more modest (“Test large-scale synthetic genome in the cells”). In addition, the journalist alerted the secrecy of the meeting.
Anyway, the Church hopes to complete the human genome ten years. Earlier, a similar accomplishment could only be exercised by the group of Craig Venter, who created in 2010 a bacterium with an artificial genome. However, the creation of artificial human cells — is much more difficult task.
In February 2016 the UK government has allowed researchers to conduct experiments on the edit the genomes of human embryos. The ultimate goal of scientists is to solve the problem of miscarriages. They want to identify genes that are most actively operating in the first days of life of a fetus when the embryo forms cells — the basis of the future placenta.
