From CounterPunch
By Peter Montague

One of the top developments of 2005 is a kind of genetic engineering on steroids — a new field called “synthetic biology” in which scientists are setting out to create new forms of life that have never existed before.

In “genetic engineering,” natural genes from one species are inserted by force into a different species, hoping to transfer the properties or characteristics of one species into another. Trout can live in cold water, so maybe a trout gene blasted into a tomato will help tomatoes withstand cold weather. The limitation on this system is the characteristics that nature has built into the genes of species.

Now scientists have overcome that limitation. They are learning to develop entirely new species, new forms of life. Awareness of this new scientific specialty — called “synthetic biology” — began to appear in the press in 2005.

The construction of living things from raw chemicals was first demonstrated in 2002 when scientists created a polio virus from scratch. They found the polio virus genome on the internet, and within 2 years had created a virus from raw chemicals. The synthetic virus could reproduce and, when injected into mice, paralyzed them just as a natural polio virus would do. They said they chose the polio virus to demonstrate what a bioterrorist could accomplish.

“It is a little sobering to see that folks in the chemistry laboratory can basically create a virus from scratch,” James LeDuc of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said at the time.

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