Fourth GP-Write meeting kicks off this week

Almost four years after GP-Write made its tumultuous debut, critics saw its “secret” organizing meeting as evidence of nefarious intent. The project to create genomes from scratch holds its fourth annual meeting starting tomorrow in New York City. Scientists from a dozen countries will describe their latest progress toward the goal of creating designer genomes, in which an organism’s natural DNA sequences are replaced by lab-made ones, often with a twist intended to make them superior to the ones found in nature. The nearly 50 presentations include the bottom-up design and synthesis of bacterial and other genomes, and the creation of the largest-ever lab-made chromosome (of a yeast). Ethical issues will also be on the table since, as one multinational team said in a description of its work, “The potential creation of new life forms raises questions.”