It is in the ordained order of things on Capitol Hill that Congress shall, more often than not, hold hearings when large scientific splashes are made. Thus did the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Democrat Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, convene this morning to hear from J. Craig Venter the details of his latest coup: the manufacture and insertion of a fully synthetic bacterial genome into a closely-related cell which then booted up and began life’s processes according to the directions of that genome.
The details were published in Science last week, with attendant fanfare, leaving members of Congress eager for a first-hand briefing by Venter and other experts including Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, and Jay Keasling, the acting deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who directs the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center at the University of California Berkeley (you can check out the full witness list and read their testimony here).
The politicians’ comments and questions ranged from the highly serious to the silly. Rep. Joe Barton of Texas said he would eagerly provide backing for development of a synthetic genome “that would predispose folks to vote Republican”. Barton, who admitted he was struggling to understand, biologically, exactly what Venter had achieved, got a little ahead of himself, worrying about the possibility of creating humans de novo.
Barton: “I kinda like the original way of making human beings. It’s fun. It’s recreational.”
Venter: “Let me first assure you that we do not want to replace any of those human processes.”
Other committee members were curious about the new technology’s potential for attacking everything from the common cold to global warming. Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, asked Venter about its potential for improving cell-based technology for making influenza vaccine.
The advance, said Venter, “gives us the ability to reconstitute small things like the influenza virus very quickly….We think, with these new techniques, that in less than 24 hours, as soon as a new [influenza] virus was detected, we could have new candidates out there” – with the crucial participation of his lieutenant Dan Gibson, the Science paper’s first author, Venter hastened to add.
Others worried aloud about unintended consequences – even those more banal than out-and-out bioterrorism. “What if we created the [environmental] equivalent of the zebra mussel?” asked Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican and medical doctor. “What do we have to protect us from the unintended consequences of one of these experiments gone wild?”
In what he could offer of reassurance, Fauci, the only government official among the witnesses, pointed at least three times to President Barack Obama’s May 20 charge
to his Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to review the issue as its “first order of business,” and to report back to him with recommendations within six months. Fauci also noted that the US government is expected to finalize next month its proposed new rules for DNA manufacturers, governing how easily a customer may or may not order up snippets of DNA that could be stitched together to produce something nasty.
Waxman, the chairman, finished the hearing by proclaiming both the “dawn of a new age of science” and the sobering necessity of keeping a careful eye on where it leads. He promised Venter: “We will continue to monitor your progress and continue our oversight.”
For more coverage of the synthetic genome, see Nature’s news analysis:Synthetic genome resets biotech goals, opinion column:A synthetic creation story, round-up of reaction from leading scientists and thinkers in the field:Sizing up the ‘synthetic cell’ and Nature’s editorial, Challenges of our own making.