For those of you who like to keep track of what is going on in the world, I try to update you on significant scientific stuff that may eventually affect your life, or maybe your grandchildren’s lives.

A few years ago, around the beginning of the new millennium, a guy named Craig Venter, using computers, figured out the sequence of nucleotides that make up the human DNA. I predicted then that this heralded a new breakthrough and focus in medicine that would change everything and that he should get the Nobel Prize. Well, he did. And because of his work they have found the genetic sites of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and lots of others.

That is just the beginning. Others will come. In fact, only recently a team of B.C.-based scientists decoded the genome of a patient’s breast cancer. Future generations will look back on these past years as the dark ages of primitive medicine.

So, with that self-congratulatory introduction, let me again predict the future. It is called biotechnology. Little more than a hundred years have passed since a monk named Gregor Mendel demonstrated that the defining characteristics of a pea plant – its shape, size, and the colour of its seeds, for example – are transmitted from one generation to the next in ways that can be predicted and repeated. These findings were ignored for years. And Fr. Mendel didn’t live to know he had founded the science of genetics or even know what a gene was.

I don’t have the space to recount all the steps that took place over the intervening years; the genetics of blood groups, the discovery in the 50’s of the double-spiral structure of DNA by Watson and Crick (Nobel Prizes for both) and on and on, so I will just jump to the present.

Clearly the industrial age is drawing to a close and will be replaced by an era of “biological engineering”. It won’t happen quickly, but it has already started. Let me give you an example.

Malaria infects around five hundred million of the world’s poorest people and every year kills around a million, many of whom are children under five. For many years the usual treatment was quinine and/or chloroquine. But lately the most virulent malaria parasite - Plasmodium falciparum – has grown resistant to the drug. The only consistent treatment is Artemisinin, now the world’s most important malarial medicine.

Unfortunately it is very expensive, far beyond the reach of most poor African nations to treat huge numbers of the population. It is derived from a plant called Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, that grows wild. The plant has to be harvested and the arteminisic acid extracted and purified and all that costs money. It is not easy to cultivate, yields are low and production is expensive.

So now we come to Dr. Jay Keasling, a biochemistry professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology. This gets really complicated but let me just say it has to do with actually making synthetic DNA and constructing genes from scratch.

Do you get it? We will no longer have to depend on nature to supply us with the stuff we need. We can actually make new forms of life. As the editors of the journal Nature said in 2007, ”For the first time, God has competition.”

So Keating and his laboratory crew put together the genetic chemistry of a cell with a metabolic pathway that did not exist in nature, and that manufactures artemisinin. Actually, it manufactures amorphadiene, which is the precursor, but let’s not get into that. They did it by inserting three specific genes into E. coli, one of the world’s most common bacteria. This is seen as the first bona fide product of synthetic biology.

Dr. Keating’s original goal was to design and produce artificial fuels that emit little or no greenhouse gases – one of President Obama’s frequently-cited priorities. But then he got interested in the malaria problem. Artificial fuels are probably still on the list.

That, my friends, is the future. Sounds like science-fiction, doesn’t it? Well, it once was, but not anymore.

Categories: Appointment with Polhman, Columns
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