Catholic Bioethicist Weighs in on Scientific Effort to Create Life from Scratch

“We are trying to mimic these three functionalities; however, we will use different molecules. If that system can subsequently evolve, really evolve, so that something new can be created that we have not put in, then you have life,” Otto said.

The project has a six-year timeline, with the goal of demonstrating rudimentary Darwinian evolution; in other words, the scientists want to see if their creations can get to the point where they start to grow and change on their own, without further input from the scientists.

Some have criticized the field of synthetic biology, saying scientists run the risk of inadvertently creating “mirror life” — synthetic bacteria, for example, that have structures that are a reflection of organic life but are able to overwhelm organic creatures’ defenses because of their differences, potentially allowing them to infect people.

For his part, Otto told Financial Times that MINILIFE’s creations were “extremely unlikely to have any viability outside very controlled lab conditions” and posed no possible risk to the public. The MINILIFE team says it is working with experts to develop an ethical framework for the research, considering the potential implications of creating artificial life.

‘God-like powers’

Though not explicitly addressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Catholics are free to believe in evolution, though the Church maintains a crucial distinction, courtesy of Pope Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis: that the evolution of the human body is considered scientifically investigable, while the origin of the human spiritual soul is held to be a direct act of God and thus a matter of faith, not science.

“[T]he teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions … take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from preexistent and living matter — [but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God,” Pius XII wrote in Humani Generis.

But what should Catholics make of MINILIFE’s efforts to create new, evolving life from scratch?

Father Tad Pacholczyk, senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA in written answers that the MINILIFE project’s research could potentially be valuable, both scientifically and ethically, if done right.

Scientific efforts to try to understand life, even by synthetic means, could potentially deepen humanity’s appreciation of human life as a gift from God, he said.

However, the priest cautioned that such a project may prove irrelevant if “the resultant system has little or nothing to do with real-world biological systems” — the researchers may well succeed in their goal, but it could at the same time be the case that organic life “may have arisen through a series of very different steps than the ones ultimately employed by these researchers to produce a basic ‘living’ entity,” Pacholczyk said.

Further, Pacholczyk said efforts to create life from scratch in a lab can come with ethical risks if scientists are motivated by a desire to “access God-like powers” by creating and thus becoming a “master” over life (though, it should be noted, this is not the stated goal of the MINILIFE project).

“While these types of ambitions can raise spiritual concerns, I also think that man’s quest to understand his own place in the universe, and his desire to understand some of the mechanisms by which his own bodily nature may have arisen, constitute worthwhile and enriching pursuits that can provide us with a greater appreciation for the gift that life really is, even serving to direct our vision more intensely towards the Creator of life,” Pacholczyk said. 

Despite the potential benefits of the scientists’ research, Pacholczyk pointed out that the timeline for the scientists’ project, as they describe it, is very ambitious, perhaps overly so. Can something made in six years really compare to organic life, made gradually over billions after being set in motion by God himself?

“Living systems are marked by a very high degree of complexity … I think they may be overly ambitious to propose generating such a system in the short space of six years,” Pacholczyk said.

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“Cells, even the simplest cells such as bacterial cells, manifest an incredibly high degree of complexity, and that’s without even considering other cells, like animal cells, which are significantly more complex still.”

In his interview, Otto admitted to the complexity problem but said a major goal is to get to the point of evolution, at which point it’s not certain what will happen next to the system.

“A significant condition for me is that the system is capable of independent evolution. When the system itself is doing things we have not put into it, I will be happy,” he said.