Synthetic cell must benefit mankind: Vatican

ROME - Vatican and Catholic church officials in Italy welcomed Friday the creation by US scientists of the first synthetic cell, but stressed that such scientific discoveries must ultimately benefit mankind.

“If it is used toward the good, to treat pathologies, we can only be positive” the Vatican’s top bioethics official, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, told Italian state-run television news programme TG Uno.

“If it turns out not to be … useful to respect the dignity of the person, then our judgment would change,” Fisichella, who heads Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, added.

Thursday a group of scientists led by genomics pioneer Craig Venter announced they had created a living cell controlled by a synthetic genome.

The researchers claim the method will help them investigate how life works and can be used to create bacteria designed for the production of biofuels and cleaning the environment.

The head of the Italian Catholic bishop’s conference Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, while admitting he was not familiar with the details of the discovery, hailed it as a “yet another sign of intelligence - god’s gift to allow (mankind) to better understand and order creation”.

“However, intelligence can never be without responsibility,” Bagnasco stressed.

“Any form of intelligence and any scientific acquisition … must always be measured against the ethical dimension, which has at its heart the true dignity of every person,” he added.

Catholic church teaching holds that human life is god’s gift, created through natural procreation between a man and woman.

The controversial issue of engineering life in a laboratory raises several ethical and legal concerns, a fact that Venter and his colleagues acknowledged when they asked for a bioethical review in the late 1990s.