Secret Harvard Meeting Criticized For Synthetic Human Genome, Ethically Fraud Projects?

A Harvard meeting transpired three weeks ago to tackle a challenging plan to produce synthetic human genomes. Based on reports, 130 scientists, policy leaders and entrepreneurs were invited to this closed-door, invitation-only meeting, which earned a lot of criticisms.

Now, the ideas that came up in the Harvard meeting have already been published in the journal Science, announcing a project to be launched to radically lessen the cost of synthesizing genomes, which is believed to be a revolutionary progress in the field of biotechnology that may allow technicians to grow human organs for the purpose of transplantation.  

The concepts discussed in the Harvard meeting is reported to be the latest indication that biotechnology is undergoing a speedy progress yet ethically filled period. As scientists have long been enhancing their techniques for controlling the complex molecules that play as the code for all life on the planet, the similar issue brings an improvement in editing RNA, a molecule which is known as the close relative of DNA.

The proponents of synthetic genomes are seeing a project that would ultimately be on the similar scope as the 1990 Human Genome Project, which resulted in the sequencing of the first human genomes. This time, the difference will be that, rather than "reading" genetic codes, the scientists will be "writing" them, therefore, calling this as the "Genome Project-write." However, the plan received a negative response from Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, who previously led the earlier Human Genome Project, citing that it was too early to launch such a plan, RT reported.

Also, producing humans from scratch is not included in the discussion. Cheaper genome synthesis will be used to make cells that are immune to viruses. As explained by co-author George Church, these would not be the cells that are directly used in  human therapies, but instead in cell lines created by the pharmaceuticals in developing drugs.  

Meanwhile, genetic engineering has faced a lot of ethical difficulties before. Recently, the scientists from Europe, the US and China met in Washington and consented to place limits on the CRISPR, a breakthrough gene-editing technique that is reported to have the potential to produce heritable changes in a human genome, according to Science Alert.