A Presidential commission charged with exploring the bioethical issues surrounding the development of man-made life held two-days of meetings to learn about the implications of the rapidly developing area of synthetic biology and whether or not more oversight is needed from some of the leading minds in the field.

The meeting was prompted by a May report in the journal Science in which researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they had created the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell, a project that many view as a breakthrough toward the creation of artificial life forms that may soon lay the foundation for a new industrial revolution in which man-made life forms are harnessed to produce fuels, drugs and other goods efficiently and inexpensively.

It also prompted President Obama to ask his newly formed bioethics commission to look into the implications of the work and report are its findings in six months. The commission held its first meeting in Washington, D.C. on July 8 and 9 to hear what experts had to say about the potential applications and implications of synthetic biology, a field that combines biology and engineering to design and build novel biological functions and systems that do not exist in nature.

Scientists J. Craig Venter, founder and president if JCVI, George Church, professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Kristala Prather, assistant professor in the department of Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were among the experts who spoke to the commission about synthetic biology’s potential and pitfalls.

One potential application of the technology may be to produce the seed stock for a flu vaccine in just 12 hours, according to Venter. “With rapid DNA sequencing, we can predict, we think, well in advance what the changes will be for next year’s flu before the WHO even makes the decision as to the vaccine stocks,” he told the commission.

Venter told the commission that although there was the potential to use these tools to cause harm—such as making deadly viruses—he felt that it could “be readily prevented by some straightforward regulations.”

Harvard’s Church said he was optimistic about using the technology in beneficial ways but added that “we need to have surveillance and enforcement.”

MIT’s Prather said that the potential benefits are enormous but conceded that the risks are real, reported GenomeWeb News. “Because there is this information gap between what we really understand about biology and what our capabilities are, it is impossible for us to really predict what’s going to happen in every single experiment,” she said. “And so I do think it is very worthwhile to think about being as careful as possible as we do this to minimize those risks.”

Existing rules already govern genetically modified products but the new technology is “very different from what’s happened before,” according to Venter. Scientists can now create organisms using a computer and a DNA synthesizer, which “changes the rules,” says Venter.

While federally funded research is conducted under strict guidelines, the ability for garage biologists to create artificial life, raises alarm among many.

During the two-day meeting, the commission heard many views and recommendations. It will hold tow more meetings in September and November to delve further into the issues.