A 'family spat' spills out in public, as scientists debate effort to build a human genome

NEW YORK — Harvard Medical School’s George Church and Stanford University’s Drew Endy are top scientists who have expanded the boundaries of biology with their pioneering discoveries. They have written papers together and even cofounded a synthetic biology company.

But over the past month, they have been cast as the opposing spokesmen in the debate over whether scientists should try to build human and other genomes from scratch, a project that could transform our understanding of the basic building blocks of life but that is fraught with ethical issues.

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But the project raises thorny ethical questions. Although it’s not a goal of the project, in theory, brewing up a complete human genome could lead to the formation of an actual person, sans parents. The effort, in other words, picks at the most fundamental question of our identity: What does it mean to be human?

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