%0 Journal Article
%T Hand-made biology
%A Gregory A Petsko
%J Genome Biology
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/gb-2010-11-6-124
%X It's alive! It's ALIVE! ¡­ Oh, in the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to BE God! - Frankenstein (1931)Craig Venter would never be Central Casting¡¯s first choice to play Dr Frankenstein. And I can¡¯t see Hamilton Smith as Igor, either. But when these two genome biologists and their coworkers announced, in the May 20th issue of Science, that they had ¡®created¡¯ a bacterium, one would have been forgiven for thinking, based on the language they used and the turgid - even hysterical - reports in the press, that they were auditioning for the parts. Here is the opening paragraph of the account of their work in The Economist, a publication not customarily given to hyperbole:In the end there was no castle, no thunderstorm and definitely no hunchbacked cackling lab assistant. Nevertheless, Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and their colleagues have done for real what Mary Shelley merely imagined. On May 20th, in the pages of Science, they announced that they had created a living creature.But did they? Is their achievement ¡®creation¡¯ in the literal, and Frankensteinian, sense of the word (the action or process of bringing something into existence), or is it something else entirely? And if it is something else, is it still as monumental as some people, and the authors themselves, claim?In case you were in a coma and missed it, here¡¯s a brief summary of what they did. They took a ¡®host¡¯ strain, that of the small, free-living bacterium Mycoplasma capricolum, and deleted the genes for its own restriction enzymes (this would correspond to the cadaver in the Frankenstein tale). The restriction enzyme genes were deleted so that the host would not cleave the ¡®foreign¡¯ DNA they planned to insert. (The equivalent to this procedure would be immune suppressing a transplant recipient so that they would not reject the foreign organ.) Venter, Smith and colleagues then inserted into this strain a completely synthetic chromosome (the ¡®brain¡¯) for the related strain Mycoplasma mycoides. In s
%U http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/6/124