Final Discussion: Issues and Challenges for the Future

Deichmann:

My first question deals with the relevance of the fact that it took millions of years until life on earth (I am leaving out the panspermia hypothesis) evolved from simple molecules. Under the present atmospheric and environmental conditions, life has not been created de novo in nature. But scientists are on their way to create life and have so far succeeded to generate a cell with an entirely synthetic genome.

My question is, what are the major obstacles to a synthesis of life from scratch; to what extent are they related to the fact that the occurrence of life is the result of a long history?

Morange:

It is not easy. I think it is difficult to say whether life, which is created today, will be the same as that which was the result of a long evolution. It will be created by scientists who use what has been learned about life as it is. So, somehow this long history will be short-circuited by the knowledge that has been accumulated about existing life.

Whether there will be obstacles, I don't know, but I think that the interesting thing with synthetic life is that even if it doesn't work, if there are obstacles, if there are failures, they will tell us something very interesting about life. So even the failure will be positive in some sense.

Laubichler:

Well, I agree more or less completely with what Michel said, but in light of particularly the last talk, I want to ask the question slightly differently: why are we so focused on creating synthetic life? When we look at some particular forms of technology, the question is, can we do it or can we not do it, rather than what can we learn within the current approaches that we heard about in this conference, and how does that apply to life more generally?

In this context we should remember the discussions about artificial life: there you had two different versions, a weak version and a strong version depending on which camp you are in. Those debates have sort of gone away. But what we learned from these debates is an emphasis on core fundamental processes at an abstract level. Similarly, if you think about Eric's talk, what we learned there was something about our current technology and about regulatory properties. We learned a lot about ways to manipulate and to predict possible evolutionary outcomes through the analysis of those systems. Therefore, we learn about many different dimensions of life, and that's actually more interesting than the question of recreating life.

Glass:

I agree with Michel. I think that we will, in the fairly near future, assemble from chemicals off the shelf a living organism based on existing organisms. And that initial organism will be an incredibly simple species. The philosophical implications of this are and will be largely up to the members of this community to deal with. From a scientific perspective, such a synthetic organism will offer a new understanding of what are the fundamental principles of cellular life. Additionally, the creators of such an organism will have to identify some clear advantages the synthetic cell offers for some utilitarian purpose. It will be the utilitarian value of the organism that will enable us to find the money to pay for doing something like this. Because I think obtaining support fund this kind of research endeavor is even now the main thing that stands between us and the creation of a fully synthetic life form. As for producing life forms more sophisticated than simple bacteria, it is an enormous leap to go from making simple bacterial cells in the laboratory to making a higher organism such as we have heard about today. But I think this is definitely in our future, and I think the philosophical implications of this are what you want them to be.

Davidson:

I would say to begin that we need a...