The world’s largest medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, has given an initial £10m to a project to begin creating the building blocks of human life from scratch, the BBC reports.
The Synthetic Human Genome Project will seek to enable researchers not just to read a molecule of DNA, but to create parts of it.
The BBC notes that such research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to designer babies or unforeseen changes for future generations, but that the Wellcome Trust says it has the potential to do more good than harm by accelerating treatments for many incurable diseases.
Dr Julian Sale, of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, who is part of the project, is quoted as saying: “The sky is the limit. We are looking at therapies that will improve people’s lives as they age, that will lead to healthier ageing with less disease as they get older.
“We are looking to use this approach to generate disease-resistant cells we can use to repopulate damaged organs, for example in the liver and the heart, even the immune system,” he said.
But critics fear the research opens the way for unscrupulous researchers seeking to create enhanced or modified humans.
Dr Pat Thomas, director of the campaign group Beyond GM, said: “We like to think that all scientists are there to do good, but the science can be repurposed to do harm and for warfare.”