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Life Made to Order
Roland Piquepaille writes "When he was president of Celera Genomics, Craig Venter was the leader of the private project which deciphered the human genome. Now, he has another goal: create custom-made organisms -- one DNA letter at a time. 'Venter's objective is not merely to tweak existing life forms by inserting genes that confer specific traits -- the main tactic in conventional genetic engineering. Instead he wants to assemble an entire genome, DNA letter by DNA letter, putting together only the genes he wants: those necessary for an organism's survival and those that will allow it to carry out a desired task.' If successful, maybe in a decade, this could yield new sources of energy or novel drugs. Venter is not alone in this quest. Other institutions, private companies or universities, have similar efforts under development. Check this column for a summary of this eye-opening -- but quite long -- Technology Review article."
Actually, the irony of your statement is that we're going to need better nano-technology to complete the task. As enthusiastic as these companies are, the problems in intentionally constructing a DNA molecule letter by letter are huge: notably, if you screw up in one spot, you can have tremendous problems.
Further, there's no "spell check" for them, using current methods. They wouldn't know they had a problem until they start letting it reproduce, only to find that they have an [apparently] inexplicably error, possibly making the organism unviable.
Whats needed is sophisticated enough nanobots that will be able to not only perform the construction of the DNA, but to "spell check" it by running up and down its length continually, comparing it against the desired pattern.
"Stumble before you crawl"
I heard about scientists trying to create a new type of organism a little while ago... It scared me then and it scares me now.
However, I would think that it would be totally possible to generate TONS of energy and other useful things from something like this. It might be possible to generate oil from sunlight. Huge tanks of stuff making food, energy, whatever.
The ethical complications are interesting.
If you create a new life form, do you have the right to destroy it? Maybe. If you can re-create it at a whim, why not? But then, what about existing life forms? Eventually scientists might be able to re-create just about any species in a petri dish. Can they then justifiably destroy a species, since they can re-create it at any time?
Cool sci-fi... or more accurately, cool sci-soon-to-be-not-fi.