Overview

• The Wellcome Trust has committed £10 million to kick off the five-year Synthetic Human Genome Project aiming to build a human chromosome from scratch.
• Professor Jason Chin of the University of Oxford is leading the effort to develop foundational tools and methods for chromosome-scale DNA synthesis.
• Core research teams at Oxford and the University of Kent have begun designing protocols for assembling large-scale DNA constructs entirely in vitro.
• A social science programme called Care-full Synthesis, led by Joy Zhang, will empirically examine the moral, legal and societal impacts of human genome fabrication.
• Geneticists caution that the same technology may one day be repurposed for bioweapons, designer genetics or novel human-animal chimeras.