curmudgeoning on synthetic journalism

I was about to email a friend/fellow science journalist about some posts he'd written that I didn’t like, then decided that was anti-social and bad. So I vent here, instead! He will never know...

Last week Craig Venter’s company/lab (the guy who raced the government to sequence the human genome) announced what it considered groundbreaking, proof-of-principle work supporting the theoretical basis of synthetic biology. They transplanted the genome of one bacterium into another bacterium (a mycoplasma, which is a special kind of bacteria that lacks cell walls) and, voila, got the transplanted genome to take hold in the new host. Basically, they were able to get the new body to express the genes of the old body and start to exhibit the features unique to the donor organism. This is pretty cool.

But the coverage that I’ve read (not exhaustive, of course) has failed to mention a few things, which I found particularly interesting from the conference call with reporters that Venter held last week (if I hadn’t been on the road and super-rushed, I would have blogged this for work, but alas I missed my chance). Notably:

* The efficiency was very low, something like 1 in 150,000 of the DNA-receiving mycoplasma started using the new genome. I find this important because otherwise it sounds like you take an organism, stick some new DNA in there and automatically the original DNA just rolls over and plays dead. So the fact that it’s kind of a chance procedure, at best, indicates how far, still, we have to go in understanding why one genome and not the other wins out. Anyway, it’s far from clear from the news coverage that this success they’re reporting happened as rarely as it did. Maybe I’m over-emphasizing this. When I heard it brought up in the q-and-a session, I was surprised. At the very least, it explains in part why it’ll be insanely expensive to get synthetic biology on its feet.

* The donor mycoplasma and the host mycoplasma were very, very closely related. So this doesn’t tell us anything about trying to switch up the genomes of arbitrarily chosen organisms, or using genomes generated in the lab, as Venter would like to do. Also, the mycoplasma is a pretty special organism, so extending the results will be hard. The absence of cell walls is important for a reason that I'm hesitant to try and explain off the top of my head.

None of these points devalue the underlying science. But I do think they're important for explaining how science works, why we should care about these findings, what its limitations are. Detail isn't always scary!

I wish science journalism was less hung up on the long-shot justifications for why people should read their stories. The part in these stories that talks about "someday we'll be able to..." should occupy all of one sentence. Then again, this entire post is not fact-checked, and so I'm contributing pretty unreliable information, too.