Genetics held may 10 international scientific meeting on issues of creating synthetic DNA. The gathering at Harvard called “the Test of a large synthetic genomes in cells,” but the original title was “HGP2: draft synthesis of the human genome”. According to the NYT, the meeting of scientists was held in a narrow circle, what prompted the idea about the main topic of discussion — the creation of an artificial human, not just DNA.
Journalist the New York Times, Andrew Pollack, covering the issues of science, received information secretly held on may 10 meeting of geneticists at Harvard. Closed discussion, which was attended by 150 scientists, lawyers and businessmen, was dedicated to the testing of synthetic genomes and cells, according to therussiantimes.com. The journalist believes that this secret meeting, the scientists decided to create an artificial man. Information to the press about a closed meeting still leaked, however, the participants were assured that before the creation of the “new man” they are, they have goals where touchdowns.
The journalist Andrew Pollack managed to find out that the meeting was originally called “HGP2: draft synthesis of the human genome”, renamed it later in less than a calling “synthetic Testing of large genomes in the cells”. The meeting, according to Pollack, was reduced to achieving the goal of a synthetic genome from scratch within the next decade.
Artificial person: a hypothesis, scientists
George Church, the inspirer of the gathering, representing Harvard University, disagree with the fact that their social-scientific gathering called secret meeting and credited her goal of creating an artificial man. According to Church, this is a misunderstanding: the meeting trying only to outline the horizons of the creation of long strands of DNA. Such a scientific breakthrough would facilitate research activity in industry of genetic engineering (animal and plant), not the person.
Artificial genome, however, has created in 2010 a research team led by Professor of genetics at the J. Craig Venter has recreated the DNA of the bacteria Mycoplasma mycoides. Of course, the human genome is much more complicated Mycoplasma, but the principle has already been tested — that’s what science is valuable. Time does not stand still, and yet in Europe and the United States raging ethical debate about the creation of an artificial genome, the governments of Japan and the UK have already agreed to modify with human embryos for scientific purposes, China is also inclined to such approval.
Cloning is already in the past, now science is moving in the direction of creating an entire organism from scratch. Long chains of DNA gradually reveal their secrets geneticists. The problem of creating an artificial person — is not so fantastic as, for example, five years ago.
