The next hot toy: Biochemistry sets

Originally published 10 January 2000

July 3, 2015. Has­bro-Mat­tel, the toy divi­sion of Microsoft Uni­ver­sal, today announced a prod­uct that will like­ly be found under many a Christ­mas tree lat­er this year: The Lit­tle Cre­ator Bio­con­struc­tion Set.

It’s not cheap, but this spiffy kit lets kids cre­ate microbes that they design them­selves — liv­ing organ­isms, unlike any that exist in nature. “The day of Tin­ker Toys, Lego, and Erec­tor sets is past,” said a spokesper­son for Has­bro-Mat­tel. “No more sta­t­ic or motor­ized con­struc­tions. With the Lit­tle Cre­ator Bio­con­struc­tion Set, a kid can build things that metab­o­lize, inter­act with the envi­ron­ment, even reproduce.”

For the moment, this means one-celled organ­isms that must be observed under a micro­scope, but the com­pa­ny promis­es mul­ti-celled crea­tures with­in a few years.

The present kit con­tains an assort­ment of 500 genes — the min­i­mum nec­es­sary for life, plus enough extras to add vari­ety. With the includ­ed appa­ra­tus, chil­dren can string these genes togeth­er into a chro­mo­some of their own choos­ing, then insert the chro­mo­some into micro­scop­ic cap­sules con­tain­ing amino acids, fats, and sugars.

Not all arrange­ments of genes will result in viable organ­isms, but the num­ber of pos­si­ble arrange­ments is stag­ger­ing. Not even the toy’s man­u­fac­tur­er can pre­dict what sorts of crea­tures might pop out of the apparatus.

“One excit­ing part of play will be nam­ing the organ­isms a child cre­ates,” said the com­pa­ny spokesper­son. “That’s a priv­i­lege that belongs to the child alone.”

The Lit­tle Cre­ator Bio­con­struc­tion Set had its ori­gin in sci­en­tif­ic research done at the Insti­tute for Genom­ic Research in Mary­land around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um. Sci­en­tists at the insti­tute set out to deter­mine the min­i­mum gene set nec­es­sary for life.

They start­ed with the free-liv­ing organ­ism that had the small­est known num­ber or genes, the bac­teri­um Mycoplas­ma gen­i­tal­i­um, a harm­less inhab­i­tant of the human gen­i­tal tract and lungs. The bac­teri­um has just 480 genes, com­pared to more than 100,000 in a human.

One by one, the sci­en­tists inac­ti­vat­ed genes along M. gen­i­tal­i­um’s sin­gle chro­mo­some, to find out which genes the tiny organ­ism could­n’t do with­out. They final­ly zeroed in on about 300 genes that are essen­tial for via­bil­i­ty. These are among the 500 genes includ­ed in the Lit­tle Cre­ator Bio­con­struc­tion Set.

Still, a chro­mo­some con­struc­tion toy was not pos­si­ble until the tech­nol­o­gy of gene splic­ing and manip­u­la­tion became suf­fi­cient­ly inex­pen­sive. The Has­bro-Mat­tel tech­nol­o­gy uses spe­cial­ly-designed sil­i­con chips to facil­i­tate the selec­tion and splic­ing of DNA strands.

“Kids today are too sophis­ti­cat­ed to accept old-fash­ioned gold fish or ham­sters as pets,” said the Has­bro-Mat­tel spokesper­son. “They want life forms they have designed them­selves, and the Lit­tle Cre­ator Bio­con­struc­tion Set gives them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do just that.”

Asked if the new toy lets chil­dren “play God,” the spokesper­son said: “I would rather say it gives them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play Bill Gates. What we are talk­ing about here is unre­strict­ed inno­va­tion, a chance for kids to exer­cise their human cre­ative poten­tial with­out imped­i­ment by government.”

Nonethe­less, some gov­ern­ment offi­cials and aca­d­e­m­ic ethi­cists are concerned.

When the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing arti­fi­cial life from a min­i­mum gene set was first broached in the win­ter of 1999, sci­en­tists and ethi­cists called for a full pub­lic debate of the moral­i­ty of exer­cis­ing this tech­nol­o­gy. It seemed then that the emerg­ing def­i­n­i­tion of life as a min­i­mum set of chem­i­cal instruc­tions for mak­ing pro­teins stood in stark con­trast to tra­di­tion­al def­i­n­i­tions of life that invoked soul or vital spirits.

How­ev­er, before the debate could get prop­er­ly under­way, it was left behind by the rapid­ly devel­op­ing tech­nol­o­gy. “What can be done, will be done,” seems to be a rule of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. As in the case of human cloning, moral reser­va­tions about the cre­ation of arti­fi­cial life did not deter sci­en­tists from plung­ing ahead into murky eth­i­cal waters.

By the year 2010, genet­ic engi­neer­ing of orig­i­nal and mod­i­fied organ­isms was com­mon­place. It was inevitable that soon­er or lat­er these pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies would become the basis of a chil­dren’s toy.

“What seems bizarre or even fright­en­ing to one gen­er­a­tion, becomes old hat to the next,” says ethi­cist Pas­cal Swa­ger of Pfiz­er Uni­ver­si­ty (for­mer­ly Har­vard). “The eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of new tech­nolo­gies will need to be assessed more quick­ly if philoso­phers or the­olo­gians hope to have any say in shap­ing our future. By the time a tech­nol­o­gy in embed­ded in a child’s toy, it is too late.”

What about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that organ­isms built with the Lit­tle Cre­ator Bio­con­struc­tion Set will pose an envi­ron­men­tal haz­ard? The Has­bro-Mat­tel spokesper­son said: “We are con­fi­dent that any microbe assem­bled from the cur­rent gene set will be harm­less, and cer­tain­ly neg­li­gi­ble com­pared to the count­less genet­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied organ­isms that have been released into the envi­ron­ment dur­ing the past decade.”

“And besides,” he added, “so many nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring ani­mals and plants have gone extinct due to human tech­no­log­i­cal activ­i­ties, the world can use a lit­tle novelty.”

More nov­el­ty is in the works. If all goes as planned, with­in a few years kids will have the abil­i­ty to design pets they can play with with­out a micro­scope. Pink ham­sters. Pol­ka dot­ted gold fish. Para­keets that glow in the dark. “The time for debate is over,” says Pas­cal Swa­ger. “The future is here.”