New
Frontiers In Biological Sciences
Science has been the most happening
field perpetually unfolding, unfurling, discovering new vistas and reaching new
horizons incessantly. Biological sciences have out grown its boundaries. With
its full fledged wings of knowledge and steering high in creativity, is
extending its purview of research to new avenues.
Advances in biological sciences are now
surpassing the latest developments of computing and surging ahead with new
discoveries at an unimaginably faster rate. Life science is out performing and
reinventing itself to bring in the best to the fore. As per Gordon Moore,
(co-founder of Intel) growth in this field has been exponential, i.e explosive doubling. The tools of
genetic engineering, needed for manipulation of life are costing precipitously
less and rising in their quality. Even the time lag in various processes has
drastically come down. Making it more viable as a business venture or for good
resource for out-sourcing which can generate lot of employment for educated and
trained youth. Thus cost to return ratio is quite high making it as a
profitable enterprise on a large scale.
Biological sciences offer a greater
provision for collaborating more actively with the computer algorithms and the
results are astounding. New stream of sciences like the Bio-informatics, Proteomics, Genomics
are making much progress by offering greater insights into the cell, its
functions. These latest fields of study are offshoots of an interplay between biology and computation. Gone
are the days when people would imagine that working in a Biochemistry or
Molecular Biology lab involves use of pipettes and sterile glass apparatus. It
has progressed much beyond that. The new tribe of computational biologists are
equally knowledgeable and sometimes much better equipped to solve the problems
in biology. Progress made by these new advances in bioinformatics is spectacular.
Consequently the speed with which genome sequences of several living organisms
have been unraveled is breath-taking. More than 150 genome have been sequenced
since 1995.
The major breakthrough in genome
sequencing has been the most highly acclaimed sequencing of the human genome by
Craig J Venter in 1998. It marked the
beginning the events that followed it is creating new ripples in this field.
Genetic engineering in the formative stages was a very tedious process.
Several steps had to be carefully executed to obtain a fragment of DNA with
desired gene sequence. Now the genetic code can be very easily manipulated with
a press of button. A piece of DNA can be cut and effortlessly imported from one
species to another. It can be reused, re purposed and several bases can be
swapped in and out with great precision. All these techniques have evolved,
progressed and resulted in the genesis of new field of science “Synthetic
Biology” or in short “Syn-Bio”. This field is now set to change the contours
of the life sciences with its immense potentialities.
Double-stranded DNA
This draws me back to the incident of
an aspiring young girl who after obtaining a doctorate degree in life sciences
wanted to pursue her dream of working as post-doctoral fellow in a reputed
American university under the guidance of a brilliant young scientist. She got a
position in the lab she aspired. She quickly completed all the formalities,
duly equipped with all the documents reached a US embassy to obtain the VISA.
But she was up for a rude shock when she was handed over a pink slip implying
that the decision on grant of VISA is temporarily suspended. Little did she
know that her application would not be cleared until the US Homeland security,
gives the clearance. All the applications of the foreign nationals awaiting US
VISA go through the security check where they ensure that they are employed for
a genuine research project. VISA is granted only when the project is
sufficiently funded and the research doesn't cause threat to security of their nation.
Extreme caution is observed due to the imminent biological threat or the terror
created by the ravishing discoveries in the field of biology in the form of
bio-weapons.
What actually are these bio-weapons?
How dangerous are they and why should we be aware of them?
Earlier obtaining synthetic DNA few
nucleotide sequence of would have been a very costly process and technically
challenging. But now a new bacterium as such as is created
whose mother is a computer. For the first time a self-replicating chromosome
has been synthesized which marked the beginning of the new frontiers. This
chromosome has been inserted into a host bacterial cell whose genome has been
emptied. The host bacterium multiplied and this new genera of bacterium with
synthetic genome has made its appearance. Though a non-pathogenic and
completely harmless pathogen has been created there is potential threat of this
technique being employed for constructing a pathogenic and deadliest version of
bacteria or virus, which is a putative bio-weapon.
Syn-Bio simplified the relatively
arduous task of gene manipulation. Hence the synthesis of any deadly virus or
microbes whose sequence has been decoded can be artificially created. Microbes
which don’t exist has become relatively less enduring. This resulted in the development of the new
cult of the biological weapons that can pose great threat to the human existence.
The historical trend clearly suggests that with the evolution of any great
technology there is always a grave of illegitimate use of the same. While most
of offenders of man slaughter and murder can be caught easily master minds of
these biological threats go undetected. Every individual is vulnerable to these
attacks in the form of disease. Personalized bio weapons targeted against high
profile people are less subtler and catastrophic, than the accidental plagues
and weapons of mass destruction.
Rapid strides made it possible to have personalized
gene therapies for end-stage cancer. To put in simple words people can upload
their diseased condition on websites and then virologists can post the designs
for customized care. Soon these can extend to the treatments beyond cancer and
diagnostic agents like vaccines, antimicrobials and psychoactive drugs could
all be tailor made to reach out to meet individual’s health requirement.
Till date almost 40 countries have a
full scale Syn Bio research. China has been making giant strides in genome
sequencing. The pioneering research done at the Beijing Genomics Institute is commendable. It is acknowledged to be the
best institute in genomics capable of sequencing nearly 700,000 human genomes a
year.
Science has become more like a double
edged sword and hence there is an urgent need for proper legislation,
regulations in order to curtail the usage of this superior technology for
carrying out malicious objectives. It is high time that all the countries of
the world join together and form an agency which can overlook all these
operations and set guidelines for putting this fabulous technology to use for
common good rather than using it for settling disputes between nations. History
already had several examples where this technology had been used by the
terrorists and radical groups to meet their malicious desires. Though there
exists biological weapons convention and chemical weapons convention in place.
The scope of these conventions has to be broadened and made stringent to
safe-guard the humanity. Otherwise nations would have to live under the
constant threat of looming biological warfare and its devastating effects. Day
may not be far, just as we have an app to
offer solutions, soon it be replaced by organism(synthetic),
which can work out solutions for any problem.
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