We will soon be able to create completely artificial organisms. A new era

For the past four billion years or so, the only way on Earth to produce a functioning DNA sequence – a gene – has been to copy, possibly with errors, an earlier gene. Thanks to various molecular processes, this process of producing variety through imperceptible errors has been able to undergo sudden accelerations, through the fragmentation or integration of different genes into a single one, in a sort of genomic puzzle that can reshuffle the cards even starting from different organisms; in each case, however, the production of varieties has been limited to processes that they started from pre-existing genetic material and used that to make new versions of old genes or collages of thosestarting with more or less random reorganisations.

Natural selection then took on the task of cleaning everything up from evolutionary errors and horrors, relentlessly sifting the populations of genomes to let only those able to compete and efficiently cope with the environment in which they found themselves survive.

About ten thousand years ago, man began to interfere with this process, adding to the selection exercised by the environment that of breeders and farmers, who have begun to choose plants and animals on the basis of certain characteristics useful to our species, consequently protecting some genomes and discarding others, but above all by selectively crossing those organisms bearing interesting traits; the effects of this additional selection made by man were then indirectly reflected on the rest of living species, because plants and domestic animals have both destroyed and created environments and selective pressures with which other living organisms have had to deal.

In general, therefore, the genomes of all populations of those organisms that have come into contact with humans and their allies of other species have changed, over time, in response: new pathogens have emerged, many populations and even in some cases entire species have gone extinct (for example due to predation by cats and rats) and so on.

The culmination of this process is represented today by genetically edited organisms, which are a development in perfect continuity with traditional selection systems and which are no different from what biological evolution itself has produced, by randomly crossing the genomes of very different organisms in order to “see the effect it has”, from the point of view of selection.
However, a different and much more radical step is now on the horizon, which is the result of the development of synthetic biology techniques over the last two decades.

We have long since found ways to build whole new genes from scratch, synthesizing DNA fragments and then assembling them with molecular biology techniques to obtain the desired product; moreover, the day is near when we will be able to do without even molecular biology, synthesizing entire genes in a dedicated machine.

In a further step, artificial intelligence algorithms that operate roughly like linguistic models of the ChatGPT type, which have caused so much discussion in recent weeks, have been able to invent new genes from scratch, and therefore new proteins, with a function predetermined; in other words, using as “source texts” the genetic sequences of hundreds of thousands of proteins with known functions, they have deduced “semantic” and “grammatical” rules to assemble new “texts”, i.e. new genetic sequences, of desired meaning . Once the proteins designed by the algorithm in question were obtained in the laboratory, very different from any protein discovered so far in nature, it was found that they had the desired activity – for example, they worked by destroying bacteria as does a certain well-known protein, human lysozyme.

At this point, the last step is missing: the construction of an entire synthetic genome, which is able to regulate the production of each protein necessary to support a totally synthetic and man-made organism. It is certainly a very ambitious goal, but it should be noted that it has already been possible to assemble completely artificial cells starting from selected constituents, obtaining living material. The artificial cells thus obtained still depend for their genesis on the use of other (bacterial) cells for the production of the necessary components, and above all they are based on components which in any case, ultimately, exist in nature; however, the obtained process illustrates the feasibility of the “bottom-up” approach of building a synthetic living organismand therefore paves the way for the use of components obtained from completely artificial genes, designed by an algorithm and obtained chemically using a new generation machine for the synthesis of long DNA sequences.

The era of synthetic biology and completely artificial living organisms is approaching, at least in the laboratory; consequently, it is time to start evaluating what this means from the point of view of risks, ethics and development possibilities for all of humanity, to avoid finding ourselves having to discuss it after the fact.
Are we ready to create life by intelligent design?