For a passing moment, a very dark thought occurred to Leung Wai Tak.
A student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he and some of his classmates were competing in the world’s premier undergraduate competition in synthetic biology. They came up with a clever, if evil, idea: Create a type of bacteria that when activated by the temperatures inside a human body would unleash a programmed rampage of cellular destruction.
“We really thought of something really kind of dangerous,” he said.
It was only a brief notion during a brainstorming session, and his fellow undergraduates quickly moved on. Their eventual entry this month here at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition involved designing a bacterium that is genetically programmed to swim when exposed to light. “It’s just fun,” Mr. Leung said, explaining the project’s scientific rationale.
In many ways, the range of ideas that Mr. Leung’s team considered reflected both the giddy excitement and the foreboding anxiety that mark these early days of synthetic biology. It’s a dilemma vexing government regulators, as policy makers struggle to navigate a course between unimaginable scientific promise and unknowable horror.
Despite the term’s sometimes-ominous connotations, synthetic biology is really just the latest advance in genetic manipulation, dating back to the ancient Chinese breeding rice and Gregor Mendel experimenting with pea plants. Such manual cross-breeding techniques were overtaken in recent decades by the discovery of DNA and the subsequent practice of cutting the genetic code from one organism and implanting it into another, replicating desirable traits.
Now, with synthetic biology, scientists have figured out how to write the genetic code themselves, essentially custom-designing characteristics of an organism, even in cases where a desired trait can’t actually be found in some other living entity.
The approach is expanding and accelerating genetic engineering, raising hopes for breakthroughs not just in human health and agriculture, but also in such fields as energy production and materials design.
Already, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, Jay D. Keasling, has used the rapid genetic-engineering capabilities of synthetic biology to create and combine artificial genes to speed the production of artemisinin, a drug to fight malaria, which kills an estimated 800,000 people a year.
And the agricultural-biotechnology supplier Monsanto is among many companies at which genetic research is evolving into synthetic biology. Monsanto offers a portfolio of genetically engineered food crops, many designed to survive the company’s own weed-killing chemicals. Tests during this year’s blistering drought in the United States showed promise for a type of corn bred with a bacterial gene that helps it retain water.
At the same time, synthetic biology and associated technologies continue to raise fears, with scenarios that include easy-to-make arsenals of biological weapons and societies breeding a master race. Just days before this year’s iGEM conference, The Atlantic sketched out a hypothetical assassination of President Obama, describing how a few stray cells from his body—perhaps from a strand of hair or a drop of saliva on a discarded cup—could be converted into a flu virus that, once spread across, say, the Harvard campus, would cause mild sniffles in hundreds of students while proving lethal to the visiting president.
Genetic Traits From Scratch
The iGEM competition is a boisterous showcase of the dreams and, more subtly, the nightmares. It began with five undergraduate teams in 2004 and now draws about 170 teams, from 34 countries, to the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They typically raise $25,000 to $50,000 per team—often from businesses or other donors—to cover the costs of participation.
Each team can design its own genetic functions, although they are also provided with a kit of biological parts, “BioBricks,” which are previously fabricated DNA sequences of defined structure and function. The idea is to use those standardized parts, along with genetic structures of the teams’ own design, to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. The new parts are added to the competition’s collection for use in future years.
The president of the iGEM competition, Randy Rettberg, evangelizes for the BioBricks concept, predicting that the ability to build designs from standardized parts will lead to breakthrough benefits comparable to what standardized transistors and components brought the world.
In fact, synthetic biology is very much about using computer programs to design genetic traits, and even life forms, from scratch. Both the breakthroughs and any potential calamities may still be a few years away, said Andrew W. Torrance, a professor of law at University of Kansas who specializes in synthetic biology, because genetic code doesn’t always behave as anticipated.
“There’s an incredible amount of unpredictability in how things actually function,” especially when combining a series of genetic interactions, he said. “It’s still very, very early days.”
The iGEM competition reflects that, with both participating teams and successful projects steadily increasing in numbers over the years, often with updates or improvements over attempts in previous competitions.
This year’s revisited concepts included a project by Cornell University’s team, which created an improved biological sensor to detect the contamination of fresh water by toxins produced during petroleum extraction, and students from the Technical University of Munich, who wore traditional Bavarian costumes to promote a beer they perfected with techniques of synthetic biology.
Environmental protection and the genetic engineering of foods, along with improving health and medicine, have been dominant themes among iGEM teams. This year’s top prize was claimed by the University of Groningen, from the Netherlands, for a project that used an engineered strain of Bacillus subtilis, commonly found in the human digestive tract, to identify spoiling meat.
It’s not just the science that pleases iGEM organizers. From the competition’s start a decade ago, they have recognized the worries associated with such work and have grown a “practices” component, which requires teams to identify the possible public concerns over synthetic biology and propose ways of responding to them.
A key ingredient in that mix is the FBI, an annual sponsor of the iGEM competition. An agent from its bioterrorism program, Edward H. You, addresses an assembly hall full of the student teams each year.
It’s part of a highly pre-emptory strategy by the FBI, which recognizes that it can hope to ensure that the science of synthetic biology progresses with safety and security only by inserting itself into the research community.
The FBI has agents in all 56 of its field offices trying to make contact with academic researchers about potential weapons-related applications of their work, Mr. You said. He and his colleagues repeatedly described their approach as centering on a willingness to “have a cup of coffee” with anyone who has any concerns about the implications of his own work or that of anyone else. Mr. You said he recognized that the opportunity for such a personal approach may be fleeting, given that there are still only about 10 or 20 “major players” in the field.
The FBI’s message at iGEM has emphasized awareness, caution, cooperation, and reasonableness. On that last point, Mr. You gave students a detailed review of a 2001 case in which Australian researchers, trying to end infestations of mice that plagued the country’s farmers, modified a mousepox virus in the hope that it would cause sterility. Instead, their genetic changes made the virus lethal, raising fears that the method could be adapted for biowarfare.
Rather than join in condemnations of the Australian researchers, however, Mr. You emphasized their good intent. “There was a potential need and huge benefit” of their work, he said.
Recommending ‘Kill Switches’
Advocates of synthetic biology, in fact, may not be doing enough to directly explain the cost-benefit trade-offs, said Holly Million, executive director of the BioBricks Foundation, an association of scientists and engineers. She is a filmmaker who has documented the creation of Agent Orange, a powerful mix of herbicides used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. She doesn’t see synthetic biology as inherently dangerous, as Agent Orange is, but does see companies repeating a practice of refusing to be forthright about the technology.
“If their products are beneficial,” Ms. Million said of U.S. industry, “they should be able to stand behind them.”
One of the more common solutions seen at iGEM is the use of “kill switches,” which is code in the genetic instructions that causes an organism to die after a set period of time, so that any mutated life form that escapes from a laboratory can’t spread in the wild.
That’s an example of the responsible approach to synthetic biology that iGEM promotes, said Todd Kuiken, an iGEM judge and a senior program associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who works on its Synthetic Biology Project. That said, it’s not clear that many of the student-designed kill switches actually work, he said.
Federal guidelines in that regard remain sparse. The landmark regulatory event is the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, held in 1975 in California, where biologists, lawyers, and doctors met to set voluntary guidelines for the then-emerging field of genetic engineering. The kill-switch concept was among its chief recommendations.
But the idea hasn’t emerged into law, where most guidance directly addressing synthetic biology is advisory. The main prohibitions in federal law consist of restrictions on “82 of the nastiest viruses, bacteria, and toxins that pose a significant health risk” to people and plants, Mr. You said.
The National Institutes of Health just completed an intensive six-year review of possible new regulations governing synthetic biology, and the resulting changes, due to take effect in March, do little more than extend the definitions that already covered genetic engineering in general, said Andrew D. Endy, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University who helped create iGEM while at MIT, and who participated in the NIH review process.
A White House advisory panel looked at synthetic biology two years ago, and it, too, proposed a go-slow approach on regulation. The central recommendations from the panel, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, consisted of greater federal vigilance, particularly toward a growing trend of private do-it-yourself labs engineering organisms, and greater openness in government financing of synthetic biology.
Goods that involve genetic engineering—a range of items including food, medicines, and industrial products—now represent about $300-billion a year in sales, or about 2 percent of the domestic economy, Mr. Endy said. That growing financial clout, he said, may be empowering those who have argued that the country risks more by suppressing synthetic biology than by encouraging it.
Mr. Leung, the Hong Kong university student, said he sees the issue in clear terms, confident that synthetic biology will be directed toward beneficial uses. “People who study science are good people, so they would not do something harmful,” he said. “They would just to do something good for humanity.”
Even someone with bad intentions wouldn’t have the necessary equipment or facilities, he added. “It’s possible for the government to do that, but not for the civilians, because they’re monitored by the government.”
He allowed, however, the possibility that some governments in the world might authorize such work. “True,” he said softly, in response to the suggestion. “Yeah, true.”
