Erasing Borders: A Brief Chronicle of Early Synthetic Biology

Abstract

Synthetic Biology is currently presented as an emergent field involving the application of engineering principles to living matter. However, the scientific pursuit of making life in a laboratory is not new and has been the ultimate, if somewhat distant, aim of the origin-of-life research program for many years. Actually, over a century ago, the idea that the synthesis of life was indispensable to fully understand its nature already appealed to material scientists and evolutionists alike. Jacques Loeb proposed a research program from an engineering standpoint, following a synthetic method (experimental abiogenesis) and based on his mechanist vision of living beings, which he considered true chemical machines. Early synthetic biology endeavors, such as the premature experiments by Alfonso L. Herrera in Mexico, Stéphane Leduc in France, and John B. Burke in United Kingdom, were easily ridiculed on both scientific and ideological grounds. However, in retrospect, all those attempts should be considered as legitimate and sincere anti-vitalistic efforts to cross the apparent border between inert and living matter.

(Re‐)Designing Nature? An Overview and Outlook on the Ethical and Societal Challenges in Synthetic Biology

“…While the fundamental question of what life is and how it can be defined has occupied mankind for centuries it is hitherto one of the leading research questions to pave the way for a better scientific understanding of the origins of life and living matter. [65][66][67] This applies for example to viruses, which are not able to reproduce on their own, or crystals, which-under some circumstances-seem to be able to grow. One possible perspective-and perhaps the most common within the life sciences, which reflect the understanding of life that underpins traditional biologyis to define life in terms of a list of distinctive properties that distinguish living organisms from non-living matter.…”

“…[62][63][64] Additionally, these lists of criteria seem to function as fuzzy concepts by including or excluding entities, which tend to blur the lines between living and non-living. [65][66][67] This applies for example to viruses, which are not able to reproduce on their own, or crystals, which-under some circumstances-seem to be able to grow. A consequence in dealing with these challenges may be to conceptualize life as a continuous process, emphasizing the dynamic nature of all forms of life as well as the resulting fluent transitions between living and non-living objects, or else to define life as a generic principle in the sense of a yet unidentified comprehensive connection that goes beyond the familiar lists of distinctive properties and sets the foundation of the understanding of life.…”

Creating life and the media: translations and echoes

“…However, other scientists, marginalized by the official history of biology, used the “synthesis of artificial life” as a model to study of the origin and nature of life. In retrospect, the achievements of scientists like Alfonso L. Herrera with his “Plasmogeny” (Herrera 1942 ; Ledesma-Mateos and Barahona 2003 ; Cleaves et al 2014 ), John Burke with his “radiobes” (Burke 1905a ; Burke 1905b ; Campos 2015 ) or Stéphane Leduc with his impressive osmotic growths (Leduc 1910 ; Leduc 1912 ; Keller 2002 ) could be seen as eccentric efforts to understand the origin and nature of life, although they should be better contextualized as relevant episodes in the history of biological explanations, en route to the full secularization of the studies of living objects (Keller 2002 ; Keller 2009 ; Peretó and Català 2007 ; Peretó 2016 ).…”

“…For most scientists, however, the prospect of making life in the laboratory was a very difficult, yet reachable in a remote future, possibility. As it has been analyzed elsewhere, there were several scientists, convinced materialists working in diverse cultural contexts, that pursued a sincere effort to cross the border between the inorganic and the living worlds (Peretó 2016 ). In the first part of this work we present some historical cases illustrating that the quest for a deeper understanding of the nature and origin of life has been seen, by the popular press but also by some scientists, as attempts to artificially create life in a test tube.…”

The rose and the name: the unresolved debate on biotechnological terms

“…The term synthetic biology was coined in 1910 by the French biophysicist Stéphane Leduc, and it was used as the title of one of his books in 1912 (Leduc, ; Peretó, ). Leduc sought to achieve the synthesis of artificial life ‘by directing the physical forces which are its cause’ (cited in Keller, ) in the best mechanist tradition (Peretó, ).…”