A week after J. Craig Venter announced the successful synthesis of a genome and use it to control a cell self- replication, it was on the microphone again, this time to appear before the Committee of the US House energy and commerce. With two other experts in synthetic biology, a bioethicist and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Venter sailed a generally favorable round to questions about the benefits and potential risks of synthetic biology. And Fauci said the government is moving quickly to bring synthetic biology to the study of two existing panels that have done a good job of monitoring advanced research in the past.
Fauci stressed the historical record. Decades of work on the genetic code and methods of manipulation, he said, allowed Venter and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, to create a genome from scratch and use it to transform a bacterial cell. In the 1970s, caused by the invention of recombinant DNA technology, the scientific community has taken steps to police. Consequently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Advisory Committee of the recombinant DNA, which oversees genetic engineering. And in the middle of the 1980s, the US government decided the products of genetic engineering could be handled without additional regulator. In 03, in response to concerns about biological research that could be used for civilian or military purposes, NIH established the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity face dual use such technology.
Although both councils have no authority on synthetic biology, soon they will be, Fauci told the committee. NIH is reviewing the public comments collected last fall on guidelines for synthetic biology. It provides that the new rules are in June. These rules will include a voluntary program for companies that make the DNA to analyze the controls for all the sequences that could belong to smallpox or other selective agents that could be used for bioterrorism. He did not think additional regulations would be more effective to discourage activities "harmful".
"The guidelines come a big step" to encourage responsible behavior in synthetic biology, Venter said. He also stressed that researchers have been putting genes in and out of organizations without security problems for almost 40 years and that he and others are able to build new organisms that can not survive outside a special environment and therefore would not be a natural threat.
Gregory Kaebnick, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center in Washington, DC, also testified. It is halfway through a 2-year project looking at the ethical implications of synthetic biology. He called for further analysis of whether current and future regulations would be sufficient. "We must guard against overconfidence that we understand the risks," he told the committee.
Written testimony accepted in the back of a coalition of three groups of supervision was even more cautious. ETC Group, the International Center for Technology Assessment, and Friends of the Earth has asked Congress to ban the release of synthetic organisms into the environment and their use in commercial environments. "The time has come for governments to regulate fully all biology and synthetic products," they wrote.
Fixed :. Venter did not draw a self-replicating synthetic cell as this article has already said, but a synthetic genome that was used to control a self-replicating cell
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