The Venter Institute patenting synthetic life
Lambs, sheep and all those cuddly animals are so 90’s! Let me introduce you to the latest thing, and she’s a beauty (or so they say) called Synthia!
Synthia, or Syn for friends, is none other than The Venter Institute’s own human-made life form. In fact, the very first made.
It seems that The Venter Institute is proceeding to patent this life form worldwide and there is some opposition by the ETC Group that is afraid this could be the opening of Pandora’s box.
Statements like the following are among the basis of their opposition towards this monopolistic patenting of life forms.
“For the first time, God has competition, Venter and his colleagues have breached a societal boundary, and the public hasn’t even had a chance to debate the far-reaching social, ethical and environmental implications of synthetic life…”
So, although this is true, I’d like to see a debate regarding this issue. There are indeed a lot of bones to pick, and I’d like to hear the opinions from professionals on both sides.
But there is a great question that floats around…
Will Venter’s company become the ‘Microbesoft’ of synthetic biology?
What do you have to say about this, are we going a little too far? Or is this a great step ahead?
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No step done that we know of. They did not actually show that they can make the bug. The patent is based on two papers where they did random transposon insertions to map (one by one) non essential genes. The claim of this invention is for a cell with the minimal set of genes required for life that, so far, has not been published or announced anywhere.
What I dislike is not that they are trying to do this, is the patenting itself. It is so broad in wording that if by any chance they are able to uphold it in court it can really hinder any competition in synthetic biology.
So, basically they are trying to patent something that might not yet exist and by doing so, make the whole sandbox theirs to play with.
[...] while back I wrote about Synthia and now a recent article published in Science shows some more of the remarkable work being done at [...]
Just curious..who called it Synthia..the original article didnt seem to have that name?
Not absolutely sure where I read that it was dubbed Synthia, but if you do a quick Google search for “Synthia +Venter” you’ll find a bunch of other sources with that name.