Gene Genome

Mind-boggling discussions are being held at Harvard about the possibility of synthesizing a complete human genome ... in other words, playing God by creating test-tube human life to our liking ... see: New York Times Article. Basically, scientists think that, within 10 years, they will be able to not just read (which they have been able to do for years), but write the entire three billion DNA sequences comprising the human genome ...  a remarkable achievement and one that means that the resulting manufactured human would be not the result of natural selection, but of unnatural selection.

The thing I am worried about is that it is believed that only about 10% of these chemical pairs have real use in the resulting human. The other 2.7 billion are effectively inert. What if things are more complicated than that? What if some pairs only have meaning in the presence of other pairs? It seems immensely wasteful for evolution to have spent so much effort at all these meaningless encodings. Science should have a much more detailed knowledge of our genome before we begin creating new life.

And , if we did have perfect knowledge, it is quite probable that, when reconstructing say Einstein's 3 billion chemical pairs, one or more DNA sequence errors will also be made. What might we have then? Frank-Einstein? I am not saying that such science should be shut down ... because we have repeatedly seen that the March of Science cannot be stopped by ethical concerns. Science must explore the unexplored ... no matter what the consequences. I just think that we should trod very carefully into this new arena lest we do something that cannot be undone.

Perhaps when the time does come, we might name the first fully manufactured human ... Gene Genome?