On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems.
The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such an organism.
“The consequences could be globally disastrous,” said Jack W. Szostak, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist at the University of Chicago who helped write a 299-page technical report on the risks of the research.
In an accompanying commentary in the journal Science, Dr. Szostak and his colleagues warned that an organism created with the new technology could cause “extraordinarily damaging consequences for the environment, agriculture, and human well-being.”
To make such a microbe, scientists would have to build a cell that defied one of the fundamental properties of life on Earth. The molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and proteins typically exist in one of two mirror-image forms. But living cells rely on just one form.
Our DNA, for example, has a backbone made partly of sugar. While sugar molecules can exist in left- and right-handed forms, DNA only uses the right-handed molecules.
That’s the reason DNA’s double helix has a right-handed twist. Our proteins, by contrast, are made of left-handed amino acids. This combination is found not just in humans, but in every species on Earth.
