An invitation to a meeting at Harvard University to discuss a project to “synthesize a complete human genome in a cell line within a period of ten 10 years” has sparked concerns among fellow scientists and has the organizers of the meeting backtracking, according to Fox News.
The invitees to the meeting were asked not to comment on the proceedings through the news media or to post comments on Twitter until after the paper about the meeting had been published, according to account, leaving the appearance of the meeting even more suspicious to non-attendees.
That led prominent Stanford scientist Drew Endy and a Northwestern University bioethicist, Laurie Zoloth, to comment that such discussions about human genome synthesis should not be happening in closed rooms, as reported by The San Jose Mercury News.
But one of the organizers of the meeting, George Church, told the newspaper the critics of the meeting were “painting a picture which I don’t think represents the project.” He added the project was not pointed at using the technology to create synthetic people, but only cells, and would not be only restricted to human genomes.
Church defended the closed door policy by saying the project organizers had submitted a paper to a scientific journal, and were asking the participants to refrain from commenting on the discussions before the paper was published. He continued by saying the ethical aspects of the issue had been a major consideration from the beginning of the project.
The projects itself is in the very early stages, and, as yet, lacks funding for any of its goals, but Dr. Church said companies and foundations would be asked to contribute Some have already expressed an interest in the project. The group’s organizers, which includes Jef Boeke, director of the institute for systems genetics at NYU Langone Medical Center, and Andrew Hessel, a self-described futurist who works at the Bay Area software company Autodesk, also say they plan to seek funding from the federal government.
Jeremy Minshull, chief executive of DNA2.0, a DNA synthesis company, who was invited to the meeting but did not attend, said he wondered if the effort was worth the cost.
“Our ability to understand what to build is so far behind what we can build,” said Dr. Minshull. “I just don’t think that being able to make more and more and more and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper is going to get us the understanding we need.”