Mark Pine

In Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Frankenstein is the creator of the monster, not the monster himself. And in the article last week in Scientific American, it is not a single scientist working alone who creates new life (actually that has already been done by Craig Venter), but a consortium of academic institutions launched earlier this year that is working together to assemble standardized parts of living organisms.

The BioFab is a “DNA factory” located within Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, CA. It is funded by the the laboratory, the National Science Foundation and the BioBricks Foundation. Run by scientists from UC Berkeley and Stanford, it’s website explains that BioFab will “produce broadly useful collections of standard biological parts that can be made freely available to both academic and commercial users.” The name BioFab was inspired by the Fab established by the semiconductor industry to design and manufacture custom chips. According to the BioBricks Foundation,

Using … standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer.

Gene promoters and ribosome binding sites are two examples of the kind of part that BioFab will design, manufacture, and stock. The former are sequences of nucleotides adjacent to a gene, where RNA polymerase attaches and initiates translation of the DNA into the corresponding messenger RNA. The latter are short sequences of nucleotides of messenger RNA that bind to ribosomes, the catalytic sites where proteins are synthesized by stringing together amino acids, according to the instructions specified in the message.

All proteins have their own sets of genes, promoters, ribosome binding sites, and other similar elements in the DNA and RNA molecules that encode them. BioFab will attempt to catalog and stock as many of these elements as it can.

In drawing a connection to the Frankenstein novel at the beginning this post, I wanted to point to the issues it raised. Just as Dr. Frankenstein failed to foresee the tragic consequences of his creative work, I find nothing on the BioFab or BioBrick websites that consider the potential negative consequences of making life parts available for order.

I do not disagree that this work should be done. But history shows that the Frankenstein-like “monsters” can and sometimes actually do arise from scientific work. Just as the monster escaped from his creator’s lab and roamed the countryside committing murders, inevitably life actually created in scientific laboratories WILL escape from those facilities and WILL in some instances inflict harm on the planet’s natural life.

If we are to do this work (and I think we should), then our government and others of the world should license and regulate the facilities in which it is done and require effective containment of the new life forms that are created.

New life forms should not be allowed to escape into the environment or to be released intentionally. Once free, life multiplies and mutates. And it is possible that some liberated creations— and their genes—would not die off but persist and spread uncontrollably.