Scientists Announce Plans For Synthetic Human Genomes (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After it was reported three weeks ago that scientists have held a secret meeting to consider creating a synthetic human genome, the participants of that meeting have officially published their plans. They announced a plan to launch a project that would radically reduce the cost of synthesizing human genomes -- a revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation. The Washington Post reports: "The announcement, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest sign that biotechnology is going through a rapidly advancing but ethically fraught period. The promoters of synthetic genomes envision a project that would eventually be on the same scale as the Human Genome Project of the 1990s, which led to the sequencing of the first human genomes. The difference this time would be that, instead of 'reading' genetic codes, which is what sequencing does, the scientists would be 'writing' them. They have dubbed this the 'Genome Project-write.'"

Comments

WTF is the point for synthetic organs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Organs with synthetic genomes will be rejected just like any other foreign tissues. As a result, immunosuppressive drugs are needed, which prevent rejection at the expense of making the person more vulnerable to infections. The goal shouldn't be to create a synthetic genome but to make the best use of a person's own stem cells. Furthermore, I'm skeptical of the true motivations because the justifications given don't make sense and I don't understand the need to hold a secret meeting to plan the project. Nothing about this makes sense.

"The same scale" as genome analysis?

[jeffb (2.718)]

Hmm. Every genome-analysis technique in existence has a substantial read-error rate, and overcomes those errors by reading lots of strands and doing lots of statistics. It seems like a very, very large leap from "analyze a billion DNA strands to come up with a single sequence that's accurate enough" to "produce a billion specified DNA strands that are each accurate enough".