Scientists propose hugely ambitious project to build a human genome from scratch

A team of major scientists has proposed synthesizing the human genome from scratch — an ambitious and ethically questionable project that is expected to cost $10 billion and take a decade to complete. Put forward by a team of 25 scientists in Science, the researchers say they want to expand on the work done by the Human Genome Project, which decoded the 3 billion paired letters of the human genome and was completed in 2003.

"We've been very clear that this is not about making a synthetic human," one of the project's leaders, Andrew Hessel, told BuzzFeed News. However, artificial human cells could help test new drugs and vaccines or hypothetical genome edits that could lead to disease immunity or cancer resistance; the research could also help with the growth of readily transplantable organs.

Many in the field are still unconvinced by the plan, though. "Is developing the capacities to synthesize human genomes a good idea?…[The scientists] fail to pose these essential questions. In fact, in their proposal, [they] fail to pose any questions. Nor do they detail specific limits about what should not be done," Stanford bioengineering professor Andrew Endy and Northwestern bioethics professor Laurie Zoloth said in an opinion piece that called for the rejection of the proposal.

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"Why build a new chromosome rather than modify a working one?" Stanford law and ethics professor Hank Greely also asked. "It's not clear to me why large scale synthesis should be substantially better."