I have just spent a week 120 miles above the Arctic circle listening to a hand-picked group of 17 scientists discuss how to make synthetic life forms. Like it or not, this is going to happen, possibly in the next few years. Some will find that shocking, even blasphemous. To others it will seem a tremendous opportunity, scientifically and economically. Some hope it will help to solve urgent global problems. In any event, there is clearly some explaining to be done.
We are not the first to imagine making life anew to our own design. In Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), the scientist-priests who rule the technological utopia of Bensalem on a Pacific island reveal how life has become clay in their hands:
We make by art, trees and flowers to come earlier or later than their seasons: and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do. We make… their fruit greater and sweeter and of differing taste, smell, colour and figure… We have also parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds… By art likewise we make them greater or taller than their kind is, and contrariwise dwarf them and stay their growth. We make them more fruitful and bearing than their kind is, and contrariwise barren and not generative…
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