A team of UK-based researchers is going where no scientist has dared to go—writing artificial human DNA from scratch. They’re hoping the project will answer fundamental questions about the human genome and transform our understanding of health and disease.
But the research topic is, for obvious reasons, controversial. Scientists have largely steered clear of trying to create full synthetic human genomes, wary of propelling us into a dystopian, Gattaca-esque future full of designer babies.
Now, the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest medical charity, has coughed up about $11.7 million (£10 million) to kickstart the Synthetic Human Genome Project (SynHG). The charity says that the benefits outweigh the risks. The technology, it says, could be used to create new medical treatments, like designer cell-based therapies and virus-resistant tissue transplantation.
Jason Chin, a professor at the University of Oxford, will lead the project in collaboration with several other UK-based universities and research centers. Over the next half-decade, Chin and his colleagues hope to create the foundational tools, technologies, and methods to allow researchers to create genomes from scratch.
“The ability to synthesize large genomes, including genomes for human cells, may transform our understanding of genome biology and profoundly alter the horizons of biotechnology and medicine,” Chin said in a statement.
The Wellcome Trust also contributed significant funds to the Human Genome Project, which was completed 25 years ago. Actually building a human genome from nothing is even more ambitious and is expected to take years, maybe decades. Chin’s team recently synthesized the complete genome of E. coli bacteria, but that’s small potatoes next to a human genome, which is roughly 700 times larger.
“If you think about the human genome, it’s more than just a set of genes on a string,” Julian Sale, a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, told The Guardian. “There’s an awful lot of the genome, sometimes called the dark matter of the genome, that we don’t know what it does. The idea is that if you can build genomes successfully, you can fully understand them.”
The scientists’ first step will be to create a full, synthetic human chromosome, which researchers plan to tackle in the next five to ten years. Unlike genome editing, which works on one or a handful of genes at once, genome synthesis allows researchers to alter DNA at a larger scale. It could help determine how large swaths of our DNA—including those we don’t know much about—determine our health and characteristics.
“The ability to synthesize large genomes, including genomes for human cells, may transform our understanding of genome biology and profoundly alter the horizons of biotechnology and medicine,” Chin said in a statement.
Some researchers worry that the ability to write human genetic code could give researchers a scary amount of control over human living systems. It could one day be used to create synthetic humans, biological weapons, or even creatures with human DNA, Bill Earnshaw, a genetic scientist at Edinburgh University, told BBC News. But he adds that the technology necessary to do those things is still pretty far off.
The project is attempting to tackle the thorny ethical issues of creating a human genome head-on. The Wellcome Trust is funding a parallel research effort into the social and ethical issues of creating human genomes in a lab, led by Joy Zhang at the University of Kent.
“This technology is going to be developed one day, so by doing it now we are at least trying to do it in as responsible a way as possible and to confront the ethical and moral questions in as upfront [a] way as possible,” Tom Collins, senior research manager at Wellcome, told BBC News.
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