Biology Now, 2e

62 ■ CHAPTER 04 Life Is Cellular

CELLS

petri dishes. There, on a single dish, was a group

of bright-blue cells—proof that the M. capri-

colum cell had “booted up” the M. mycoides

DNA and transformed itself into an M. mycoides

cell (Figure 4.2). Gibson was ecstatic. Moments

later, he sent a text message to Venter, waking

him up. Within the hour, Venter was in the lab

with a camera, taking pictures of the tiny blue

dollop in the dish. “How does it feel to create

life?” Venter asked Gibson. They opened cham-

pagne and toasted their success.

Over the following weeks, Gibson repeated

the experiment hundreds of times to make

sure the blue cells were not an accident or a

fluke, confirming that they contained only

M. mycoides DNA. Every time, the cells with a

synthetic genome survived. The team had done

it—created the first synthetic cell. “They are

living cells,” Venter told The Scientist magazine

when the research was published 2 months later.

“The only difference is that they have no natural

history. Their parents were the computer.”

Once the research was published, the reac-

tion from the academic community, captured in

Nature magazine, was swift and divided. Some

called it a significant advance: “We now have

an unprecedented opportunity to learn about

life,” said Mark Bedau, a professor of philoso-

phy at Reed College in Oregon. Arthur Caplan,

a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania,

said, “Venter’s achievement would seem to extin-

guish the argument that life requires a special

force or power to exist. In my view, this makes

it one of the most important scientific achieve-

ments in the history of mankind.”

Others were more hesitant. “Has [Venter]

created ‘new life’?” asked George Church,

a prominent geneticist at Harvard Medical

School. “Not really.... Printing out a copy of

an ancient text isn’t the same as understand-

ing the language.” Gibson and Venter agree

that they did not create life from scratch, but

they argue that they did create new life from

existing life.

A Different Approach

While Venter and Gibson were making head-

lines, other scientists were quietly pursuing a

different approach to building a cell, working

from the bottom up rather than from the top

down. One young scientist in California decided

to start by building one of the simplest, yet most

vital, components of a cell: the layer of molecules

that surrounds it.

In the chemistry department at UC San Diego,

assistant professor Neal Devaraj was fascinated

by the idea of building life and approached

synthetic biology from the perspective of chem-

istry. “Most molecular biologists study what

exists,” says Devaraj, “but when you’re a chemist

and constantly make new compounds, you want

to engineer something from scratch.” So instead

of taking a cell apart and determining how

Individual M. mycoides cells.

Two colonies of M. mycoides, transformed

from M. capricolum.

100 μm

500 nm

Figure 4.2

The first synthetic organism

A colony of bacteria was transformed from

M. capricolum by the insertion of synthetic DNA

of a closely related species of bacterium,

M. mycoides. The investigators inserted a gene into

the synthetic DNA that codes for blue pigment.

Q1: What was the purpose of inserting the

gene that codes for blue pigment into the

synthetic DNA?

Q2: What part of the transformed

bacterium is synthetic?

Q3: Did this experiment create life?