Now, after a flurry of criticism over the secrecy of the effort, the participants have published their idea, declaring that they’re launching a project to radically reduce the cost of synthesizing genomes — a potentially revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation.
The proposal, published June 2 in the journal Science, is the latest sign that biotechnology is going through a rapidly advancing but ethically fraught period.
Scientists have been honing their techniques for manipulating the complex molecules that serve as the code for all life on the planet, and this same issue of the journal Science reports a breakthrough in editing RNA, a molecule that is the close cousin of DNA.
The difference this time would be that, instead of “reading” genetic codes, which is what sequencing does, the scientists would be “writing” them. They have dubbed this the “Genome Project-write.”
“[T]he goal of HGP-write is to reduce the costs of engineering and testing large genomes, including a human genome, in cell lines, more than 1,000-fold within ten years, while developing new technologies and an ethical framework for genome-scale engineering as well as transformative medical applications,” the group wrote in a draft of a news release obtained by The Post.
The project will be administered by a non-profit organization called the Center of Excellence for Engineering Biology, the news release said.
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