Intrusion

Over the past ten years, synthetic biology – syn bio, as everyone in the trade calls it – has changed our lives in many unexpected ways. Now, with the Kasrani case, it looks like changing it again – and unexpectedly, again!

But first – what is synthetic biology?

One way of putting it is that it’s like genetic engineering, but done by real engineers. Just as civil engineering doesn’t mean building a dam by bulldozing soil from the riverbanks into some convenient shallow, syn bio doesn’t take whatever happens to be there in the DNA and modify it. Instead, it builds new genes – and other biologically active molecules – from scratch, out of their basic components, and according to a detailed understanding of how they work.

The differences between this approach and the trial-and-error, suck-it-and-see methods of what used to be called ‘genetic engineering’ are immense. Synthetic biology has given us New Trees, which take up carbon dioxide twice as fast as natural trees, and endless varieties of other new plants, from the tough new woods to the ethanol fruits. Closest to home, it’s given us the fix, a complex of gene-correcting machinery made up into a simple tablet which when swallowed during pregnancy fixes errors in the baby’s genome, and confers immunity to almost all childhood ailments. Generations of animal testing and rigorous checking in software models run on the best supercomputers in the world have shown its safety and efficacy. For five years now, it’s been freely available to all mothers in the EU (and, by the way, made available without patents to companies in the developing world). None of the major religions has any objection to it – no human material goes into it, and it doesn’t add or take away from the human genome: it just corrects existing errors. Its effects aren’t even hereditary – it’s carefully designed not to affect the sex cells. The amount of pain and heartbreak and suffering it has already prevented is beyond calculation – and beyond dispute.

So why do some people refuse it? Well, some religious minorities are against it, as is their right. But what motivates people like Mrs Kasrani? Sheer stubbornness? Some deep-rooted doubt about ‘going too far’ or ‘going against nature’? Or something else?

We don’t know, because she isn’t saying. But while anyone has a right to object to any medical intervention, however beneficial, the rest of us have a right to know why. That’s why the judge ruled against her.

Syn Bio has made our world better. It cleaned the air. It gave us New Trees. It gave us the fix. The fix makes babies better before they’re born. So what’s with this foreign woman saying no to it? She isn’t even a god-botherer. Time to put up or shut up, missus!