Sometimes, one sees a research problem in a new light. Not a happy or pleasant light, however — a disquieting light, as if one had suddenly awakened to find the bedroom wall had collapsed during the night, and rain was coming in.
A new paper on “synthetic cells,” which reflects thousands of hours of hard and clever work by a large group of investigators, struck us as, well, rather disquieting, and even perhaps a bit mad. As in, hey wait a minute: why are you doing this?
By “a bit mad” we mean, very specifically, this:
The problem has already been solved by actual cells. The set of workable solutions is bounded and well-defined. So any path to “synthetic cells” will inevitably take these investigators right back to cells as we genuinely know them.
Or to a long string of noble failures.
An Artificial Bluejay
It’s as if some lab wanted to build an artificial bluejay, where success is defined by how close they can get to real bluejays. Meanwhile, the real bluejays themselves are watching through the window from their perches in nearby trees, and saying to each other, “Nope. No way. That one is blind. That other one won’t fly. And that last one, over there, can’t feed, never mind reproduce. So, why are the scientists doing this, again? We just aren’t interesting enough for them?”
There is a poignant Hans Christian Andersen tale which comes to mind: “The Nightingale.” You probably remember the story from childhood. The emperor of China is enchanted by the singing of a real nightingale, but one day he receives the gift of an artificial (“synthetic”) mechanical nightingale, which will sing on command whenever he wants.
Always the same song, however, and eventually, the jeweled mechanism breaks down, and the synthetic bird goes silent forever.
We wonder what Andersen would say if we brought him back, gave him a nice pair of blue jeans, t-shirt, and a leather jacket, and sent him on a visit to an origin-of-life, synthetic cell lab.