Grow It Like a Salamander!

...and shake it like a salt shaker. In recent history, we've made astonishing advances in three applications of genomics, one of the holy grails in understanding and manipulating lifeforms as we know it:

• limb regeneration in vertebrates
• creation of synthetic lifeforms
• commercial human genome sequencing
  

In late 2006, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies discovered that we could reactivate the regeneration gene presumably innate in vertebrates though only still naturally found in frogs, zebrafish, and salamanders. Lead author of the original report, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, then declared "By changing the expression of a few genes, you can change the ability of a vertebrate to regenerate their limbs, rebuilding blood vessels, bone, muscles, and skin - everything that is needed." Although limb regeneration to date is primarily the practice of engineers simulating natural mechanics, culturing of skin to treat burn victims and early stage experimentation such as the aforementioned suggests I will see a human limb regenerated before I die.

Today, Craig Venter, known for sequencing the first human genome in 2000 in partnership with the Human Genome Project and founder of Synthetic Genomics, is working to create the first synthetic lifeforms. His immediate goal is to develop a controllable alternative source of biofuels, but the potential purposes of future synthetic lifeforms goes far beyond alternative energy.

In parallel, many commercial companies are attempting to make it cost-effective for consumers to purchase the data to their personal genome sequence. Currently, companies like 23andme, Navigenix, and deCODE can only measure roughly 500,000 points in the genome out of 6,000,000,000 in the entire genome and report on 23 genes for about $1,000. Look forward to the points mapped rising, and price falling.

The vast majority of people I have spoken with firmly defend the position that new knowledge of your genome is problematic. I believe, like the first telephone, automobile, plane, email, cell phone, and twitter, it will simply be a new paradigm that the wealthy and progressive will leverage to their benefit in our collective evolution. Conceptually, it's unfortunate that we as a global society would drive ourselves to essentially "defining" people - your baby, sibling, spouse, or parent. However, the reality is that it has great promise of being the most effective measure for preventing diseases, enabling early detection of them, and possibly altering outcomes long before they could ever appear. It could also be a source of individual empowerment by allowing people to focus on their inherent strengths instead of struggling their entire lives making choices that exacerbate their "inherent deficiencies" (for lack of a better term) of which they would otherwise be unware.

The benefits of understanding even the limited repertoire that we can understand from Craig Venter's genome has been reinforced time and time by the man himself. And the challenge is not going to be a scientific as much as a social one. We live in a society that prefers to deal with disasters after they happen instead of preventing them from happening. We have a stock market that's managed by the quarter, a government that only thinks in terms of elections, our youth that lives by semesters and seasons, but we need to pick our heads up and look further into the future to address potential genetic misfortunes. Craig concluded himself that the primary way shepherd society toward that paradigm is "to convince 3rd party payers and insurance companies that they're going to make more money by preventing diseases than treating them after the occur."

There is still time to debate this topic but time is running short as advances in technology continue to accelerate development in the groundbreaking field of genomics. The one caution I offer is to move forward with consideration of all lifeforms not the human-centric world we live in day-to-day. Otherwise, the majority of what life has to offer will go unobserved and, more importantly, unappreciated.