Life anew?

The recent creation of a "synthetic organism" by Craig Venter and his colleagues his hit the headlines. By all accounts it is a thoroughly impressive piece of work, a tour de force that designed a genome from scratch, literally by writing it the way a piece of computer code is written. The perseverance and ingenuity put into the process deserve ample applause. And it should rightly catapult the emerging field of synthetic biology into the public discourse.

But it's still not a "synthetic cell" in my opinion. The genome was inserted into a cell where it started working exactly as expected. I would not hold my breath before we can design completely synthetic genomes that can do whatever we want, including eating CO2 or producing Lipitor. To this non-expert, the reason looks simple: everything in molecular biology that we have encountered until now has turned out to be more complex than expected. Designing a genome is one thing, making it produce proteins that will interact with each other in a carefully orchestrated manner, will find binding partners with exquisite specificity and accomplish the extremely complex and often non-intuitive cascades of signal transduction is quite another. A cell is not just the genome, it's really about interactions. And I am willing to bet that we are a long way off before we can generally design all those countless specific interactions which give rise to that entity named a "cell".

The Age of Irreverence

I was away on vacation for some time and seem to have missed this. Raghunath Mashelkar, the former CSIR director, has an editorial in Science where he laments the lack of 'irreverence' in Indian science. Mashelkar's point is well taken, namely, that excessive deference to professors and senior students common in the Indian academic culture can hamper free thinking and the open communication of ideas...


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