- We can build organisms that started as computer code.
(fun energetic music)
We talk a lot about genetics and how much
we've learned over the years and how much
more we have to learn before we have
a full understanding, but let me give you guys an analogy.
Imagine that the human body is like a pie.
(squelching)
An awkward gangly pie, and don't eat it.
With a pie we know what ingredients go into making it a pie.
We even know what order to add them in
so that you get a pie instead of cookies
or a huge mess, but with humans it's more complicated.
The language that makes up our genome,
we don't fully understand it, and we have
between 20,000 and 25,000 genes in our bodies.
It's incredibly complicated.
Now there's nothing wrong with getting
a better understanding about pie by making one from scratch.
With human beings it's a little more
let's say ethically complicated.
So scientists have decided to start smaller,
much smaller, like a bacterium.
This is Mycoplasma mycoides.
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute
sequenced its genome and coded it into a computer.
They wanted to modify it and see if they could
create a synthetic organism capable of reproducing itself,
being a truly viable life form.
They found that some of the genes
in the genome were absolutely essential.
You cut them out, the organism can't survive,
but other genes are a different story.
They could tweak them as much as
they liked or even drop them entirely.
In fact, they created genetic watermarks.
They signed their names in the bacteria's genome.
They also included their website's URL address.
Oh, and a few quotes, my personal favorite being
from American Prometheus, a book about Robert Oppenheimer.
"See things not as they are but as they might be."
Sounds like a motto for forward thinking.
And here's the thing, their code worked.
They developed a chemical sequence to build out
the genome and inserted it into an empty host cell.
They called it syn1.0, and then they set
a new goal for themselves.
They thought, how small can we make the genome
and still have a viable organism?
They began to tweak it and modify it further
and they came up with syn2.0, which had
the smallest genome of any known organism
including all the natural ones.
Then they did it again and came up with
syn3.0 which has just 473 genes.
And here's a killer fact.
They still don't know what 149
of those genes in syn3 actually do.
They might be able to get even smaller.
Their hope is to be able to fully understand
the complete genome of a synthetic organism.
And even for a small one, that would be
a huge deal because genes are not
unique to just a single organism.
88% of the genes you can find in me
you can find in a mouse, 47% you can
find in a fruit fly, 18% you can find
in baker's yeast, 19 on a bad day.
The more we understand about genes
the better able we are to eradicate
disease and hereditary disorders.
We can make ourselves, our crops,
our puppy dogs, healthier in the process.
It's awesome.
Beyond that we could create synthetic bacteria
that could excrete life saving drugs or bio-fuels.
Some researchers are even talking
about synthesizing a human genome,
but that's a topic for another day.
Now it does bring me to a question for you guys.
Do you think synthetic organisms
are the way of the future or is this
something we should be really concerned about?
I want to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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(pleasant mellow music)