Mikami Koichi
Department of Liberal Arts and Foreign Languages, Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University, Yokohama, Japan.
Front Genet. 2025 Sep 3;16:1667769. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2025.1667769. eCollection 2025.
In this commentary piece, I discuss what the growing interest in synthesizing DNA at large scale means to the effort to address the Ethical, Legal and Social implications (ELSI) of genetic/genomic research. The idea that the latest scientific research should be accompanied by efforts to explore and then address its ELSI first materialized in the context of the Human Genome Project (HGP). This project to read a human genome was completed in 2003, but the science of genomics has advanced since. Particularly important was successful synthesis of bacteriophage genome in the very year that the HGP was concluded. This work opened up a new direction in genomics research centering on genome-scale synthesis and re-designing of genomes, characterized as a 'writing' approach. While early targets in this line of research were microorganisms like and , technological advancements in the synthesis of large-scale DNA sequences as well as methods to assemble them into a single genome or a chromosome are being made, and in 2016 a team of scientists proposed to 'write' an entire human genome. This line of scientific research, I argue, has two major characteristics, its scale and emphasis on design, and demands discussions around 'ELSI of re-designing,' in contrast to ELSI discussions that predominated in the earlier 'reading' paradigm of genomics. Because of these differences, efforts to address this ELSI of re-design should entail re-thinking what we do as ELSI as well as how we do it.
在这篇评论文章中，我探讨了大规模合成DNA的兴趣日益增长对于应对基因/基因组研究的伦理、法律和社会影响（ELSI）的努力意味着什么。最新的科学研究应伴随着探索并解决其ELSI的努力，这一理念最早在人类基因组计划（HGP）的背景下得以实现。这个读取人类基因组的项目于2003年完成，但自那时起基因组学科学已经取得了进展。特别重要的是，就在HGP结束的那一年成功合成了噬菌体基因组。这项工作开创了基因组学研究的一个新方向，即以基因组规模的合成和基因组的重新设计为中心，其特点是一种“编写”方法。虽然这一研究领域的早期目标是诸如[具体微生物名称缺失]之类的微生物，但目前在大规模DNA序列合成以及将它们组装成单个基因组或染色体的方法方面正在取得技术进步，并且在2016年一组科学家提议“编写”整个人类基因组。我认为，这一科学研究领域有两个主要特征，即其规模和对设计的强调，并且需要围绕“重新设计的ELSI”展开讨论，这与基因组学早期“读取”范式中占主导地位的ELSI讨论形成对比。由于这些差异，应对这种重新设计的ELSI的努力应该需要重新思考我们作为ELSI所做的事情以及我们如何去做。
