Are scientists playing god?

By Greg Jones in All Sorts

A geneticist considers synthetic life and god

I don't claim to be a deep theological thinker but what I do find interesting is what provokes thoughts of personal theology! I expect there will be some common situations, such as a very personal life changing experience or a traumatic episode, but I'm sure there are a multitude of reasons. For some it may simply never be something they think about, which is a bit sad. I would like to use my "Hand of 500" offering to share with you something, which has provoked me to reflect on my own personal beliefs. Here's what got me thinking...

"On the 3rd of June this year a team of scientists, led by Dr Craig Venter, announced that they had succeeded in creating the worlds first synthetic life" (they even nicknamed it Synthia!). Some religious groups were quick to say that the scientists were playing 'god'. Are they right?

Why did this announcement strike such a strong chord with me? Now, most of you will have no idea of what I do, but I'm what's called a geneticist. I investigate the human genome, a book written in the language of DNA, with a copy being found in every living cell.

In people the book is 3 billion letters long and 99.99% of it is the same in each of us. Each of our unique inherited characteristics are due to the tiny fraction of 'spelling mistakes' we have. I spend my working day looking for the type of spelling mistakes which, rather than giving you your blue eyes or dark skin, cause some us to be more susceptible to diseases like heart attacks or certain forms of cancer. You might think that even this limited knowledge of what makes each of us unique would somehow remove some of the great mystery of life. But in fact, for me, it is the complete opposite! Rather than demystifying life by understanding the genetic code, the more I learn about it the more I see the infinite beauty of it.

Now, I'm no Lloyd Geering, but some of his ideas reverberate with me, to paraphrase one of his passages: "To be religious in any culture is to be devoted to whatever is believed to matter most in life. Thus religion can be succinctly defined as 'a total mode of the interpreting and living of life'. Could we distil our religious beliefs down to simply "interpreting and living of life?" That's somehow a bit cold for me.

I believe, that our limited human attempts to define god are rather like trying to scoop up an ocean with a sieve. I enjoyed Stuart's sermon a few weeks back reflecting on seeing god in different ways, unity in diversity. So here, in a very limited nut shell, is how I see god (and I don't think for a second that it is an all encompassing definition). I can't fully define god, I don't want to, but I don't think of a singular entity, certainly not Michelangelo's grey bearded old man. But I see god within life, and believe that god's gift to us is life itself. We have free will, so we can choose to live however we like. But the way that Jesus taught us is to value, embrace and foster life. We are therefore perpetually in an ever-present interaction with god, the parent, life.

So this is where I come back to genetics. In recent years we have found that simply looking at 'spelling mistakes' is only a part of what we can be as individuals, we now know that genes interact with our environment, so for example a so-called 'bad' gene can, sometimes, only result in bad health if it combines with something in our environment. My own work has found genes, which only increase your risk of having a stroke or lung cancer, if you choose to smoke.

So coming back to Synthia, that so-called synthetic life form. Are these scientists playing god? There may well be grounds for raising concerns about what they are doing, to question if they have tunnel vision or are even naive and arrogant -- but playing god, not even close. Just as the Wright brothers discovering the secrets of powered flight didn't mean we changed the laws of physics, a synthetic cell doesn't mean that god no longer controls the spark of life. But (and it's a big but) these scientists need to remember, as we all do, that life is a precious gift that requires love and respect.

-- Dr Greg Jones

This article was originally presented in Mornington church in July 2010 as a personal offering in the series "Hands of 500".