Ethical concerns

A canvassing of ethicists by AFP last October, when Venter trailed his ambition to create a brand-new microbe species to be called M. laboratorium, revealed several areas of concerns.

ETC, a Canadian watchdog group that uncovered Venter's patent application for M. laboratorium, worries about accountability.

"Synthetic biology is advancing at breakneck pace in the absence of any public debate or regulatory oversight," said ETC's Hope Shand. "It needs to be considered by a much wider public before it is allowed to progress further," she said.

Ownership of synthetic life forms is another big problem area.

"You have a new, and potentially very powerful platform for producing chemicals, fuels, drugs and other things. This raises a number of monopoly issues," said Jim Thomas, also of ETC, adding that some experts have predicted a fifth of all chemicals could be made through synthetic biology by 2015.

"Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world's longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn't everything. The important question is not 'how long?', but 'how wise?'" said Thomas.

"While synthetic biology is speeding ahead in the lab and in the marketplace, societal debate and regulatory oversight is stalled, and there has been no meaningful or inclusive discussion on how to govern synthetic biology in a safe and just way."

Safety concerns

A third concern is safety, which Cameron said is likelier than ethics to prompt any government ban.

"Synbio could wind up giving enormous asymmetrical power to people who are not as well intentioned as Venter to build bugs" such as anthrax, smallpox or some as-yet undreamed of toxin, said Cameron.

Another question is the impact from releasing man-made bugs into the environment. Green activists say there could be unknown consequences if novel genes mix with soil bacteria and other species.

"He (Venter) dreams of making bacteria which for instance will clean up oil spills," Jean-Claude Ameisen, chairperson of the ethics committee at France's National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm), said on Thursday.

"If the idea is to release them into the wild, the same issues will arise as with genetically-modified crops."

Venter himself appears to have sought to address some of the ethical and regulatory concerns by issuing a kind of white paper with recommendations for policymakers. But watchdog groups are not buying. They want national government and international organisations to take the lead.

How governments respond to the challenge of synbio will be a central question of the 21st century, said Cameron.

"(The rows over) genetically modified organisms and stem cells are only a small sample of what is going to happen if we can't find a way to bring tech policy into the heart of our politics," he said.