ABSTRACT

J. Craig Venter’s very recent (May 2010) successes in the construction of “synthetic living cells” (Gibson et al. 2010) has stimulated strong interest and fierce criticism within the disciplinary literature and the popular press (Itaya 2010; Wade 2010). The excitement has come in no small part from the fact that Venter’s cellular constructs encourage us to rethink certain important elements of biological ontology. We can instructively debate whether these entities are actually organisms, or truly belong to species (and if so, ask which species). We can even question whether they are alive, as life might best be understood. Here I will consider whether Venter’s creations thus fit Brown and Fehige’s (2011) definition of thought experiments—“devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things”—or at least would have done before Venter took them from the imaginary into the real. In this essay I will (1) contextualize Venter’s work, describing his achievement in what I hope is appropriate detail for non-biologists, (2) discuss the ethical concerns that attract most attention, but may be only peripherally relevant to thought experimentation, (3) relate Venter’s constructions to some of biology’s foundational concepts, and (4) explain how I see them as realized thought experiments, although perhaps of a special kind.