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A recent article in Science magazine alerted us to another alarming step in the seemingly inexorable march toward the creation of artificial life.
Scientists have created a bacteria with a genetic code more streamlined – and more meddled with – than any other life on Earth.
This bacteria, a synthetic Escherichia coli called Syn57, has been engineered to build its body using just 57 of the 64 'codons' that have served all known organisms for billions of years.
The recipe for life is written in a language that uses 64 different codons, each composed of a triplet of nucleotides. It's the long sentences of 'three-letter' codons that make up our DNA and RNA.
This follows the February 2025 announcement that scientists achieved another major milestone in creating synthetic life. After more than a decade of work, researchers reached a major milestone in their efforts to re-engineer life in the lab, putting together the final chromosome in a synthetic yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) genome.
It's the first time a synthetic eukaryotic genome has been constructed in full, following on from successes with simpler bacteria organisms. It's a proof-of-concept for how more complex organisms, like food crops (or something a lot more dangerous) could be synthesized by scientists.
"The synthetic yeast genome represents a quantum leap in our ability to engineer biology," says synthetic biologist Briardo Llorente, from Macquarie University. "This achievement opens up exciting possibilities for developing more efficient and sustainable biomanufacturing processes, from producing pharmaceuticals to creating new materials."
Coupled with the announcement of the creation of the Syn57 bacteria, the announcement of the creation of a synthetic yeast lifeform reveals the alarming advances science has made in its unchecked rush to play God.
Father Tad Pacholczyk, senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told the Catholic News Agency, in reference to another research project to create artificial life (MINILIFE) that scientific efforts to try to understand life, even by synthetic means, could potentially deepen humanity’s appreciation of human life as a gift from God, he said.
However, the priest cautioned that such a project may prove irrelevant if “the resultant system has little or nothing to do with real-world biological systems” — the researchers may well succeed in their goal, but it could at the same time be the case that organic life “may have arisen through a series of very different steps than the ones ultimately employed by these researchers to produce a basic ‘living’ entity,” Pacholczyk said.
Further, Pacholczyk said efforts to create life from scratch in a lab can come with ethical risks if scientists are motivated by a desire to “access God-like powers” by creating and thus becoming a “master” over life.
“While these types of ambitions can raise spiritual concerns, I also think that man’s quest to understand his own place in the universe, and his desire to understand some of the mechanisms by which his own bodily nature may have arisen, constitute worthwhile and enriching pursuits that can provide us with a greater appreciation for the gift that life really is, even serving to direct our vision more intensely towards the Creator of life,” Pacholczyk said.
Despite the potential benefits of the scientists’ research, Pacholczyk pointed out that the timeline for the scientists’ project, as they describe it, is very ambitious, perhaps overly so. Can something made in six years really compare to organic life, made gradually over billions after being set in motion by God himself?
“Living systems are marked by a very high degree of complexity … I think they may be overly ambitious to propose generating such a system in the short space of six years,” Pacholczyk said.
“Cells, even the simplest cells such as bacterial cells, manifest an incredibly high degree of complexity, and that’s without even considering other cells, like animal cells, which are significantly more complex still.”
Now, here’s where it gets scary. In an interview, Sijbren Otto, professor of systems chemistry at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, said that the goal of the project, dubbed “MINILIFE,” is not necessarily to understand the origins of organic life but rather to understand how life itself works.
Prof. Otto admitted to the complexity problem but said a major goal is to get to the point of evolution, at which point it’s not certain what will happen next to the system.
“A significant condition for me is that the system is capable of independent evolution. When the system itself is doing things we have not put into it, I will be happy,” he said.
In other words, the goal of at least some scientists working on the creation of artificial life is to create something whose behavior they cannot predict and that they cannot control.
The effort is being funded by the European Research Council and involves biologists and chemists from several universities. We urge an immediate end to research into and the creation of artificial life capable of independent reproduction and evolution – the risks inherent in the creation of such a menace far outweighs any benefit currently alleged for such a project.
CHQ Editor George Rasley is an ordained Elder of the Presbyterian Church, a member of American MENSA and a member of Faith Leaders for America. The views expressed in this column are his own and not necessarily the views of any denomination, congregation or religious organization.
- artificial life
- medical ethics
- Escherichia coli bacteria
- eukaryotic genome
- bacteria organisms
- synthetic yeast
- genetic code
- codons
- food crops
- engineering biology
- Syn57 bacteria
- animal cells
- Evolution
- European Research Council
- Father Tad Pacholczyk
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