Artificial Life Boots Up: Manmade DNA Created In Lab

[Daedalus]

WASHINGTON — Scientists announced a bold step Thursday in the enduring quest to create artificial life. They've produced a living cell powered by manmade DNA. While such work can evoke images of Frankenstein-like scientific tinkering, it also is exciting hopes that it could eventually lead to new fuels, better ways to clean polluted water, faster vaccine production and more.

Is it really an artificial life form?

The inventors call it the world's first synthetic cell, although this initial step is more a re-creation of existing life – changing one simple type of bacterium into another – than a built-from-scratch kind.

But Maryland genome-mapping pioneer J. Craig Venter said his team's project paves the way for the ultimate, much harder goal: designing organisms that work differently from the way nature intended for a wide range of uses. Already he's working with ExxonMobil in hopes of turning algae into fuel.

"This is the first self-replicating species we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer," Venter told reporters.

And the report, being published Friday in the journal Science, is triggering excitement in this growing field of synthetic biology.

"It's been a long time coming, and it was worth the wait," said Dr. George Church, a Harvard Medical School genetics professor. "It's a milestone that has potential practical applications."

Following the announcement, President Barack Obama directed the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues he established last fall to make its first order of business a study of the milestone.

"The commission should consider the potential medical, environmental, security and other benefits of this field of research, as well as any potential health, security or other risks," Obama wrote in a letter to the commission's chairwoman, Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania.

The rest of the story can be read here
Artificial Life Boots Up: Manmade DNA Created In Lab


This is great news
The positive applications in the field of medicine, and science are mind boggling!

 

[EffEmDoubleyou]

Hubris.

 

[Resonance]

 

[durentu]

It'll be interesting to see what happens. It's nice that is survives a petri dish, but it won't get respect until it's let loose in the wild.

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

Hubris.

Neo-Luddism.

 

[Mole]

When they tell me that have gone faster than the speed of light, I look the experiment up and find something interesting has happened but they didn't succeed in going faster than the speed of light.

And when they tell me they have created artificial life, I look at the experiment and find they have turned one bacteria into another. This is a great achievement and who knows where it will lead. But it is not creating life from inanimate matter. So how life began is still a mystery.

It's a bit like the perpetual motion machine. It is always tantalisingly out of our grasp.

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

When they tell me that have gone faster than the speed of light, I look the experiment up and find something interesting has happened but they didn't succeed in going faster than the speed of light.

And when they tell me they have created artificial life, I look at the experiment and find they have turned one bacteria into another. This is a great achievement and who knows where it will lead. But it is not creating life from inanimate matter. So how life began is still a mystery.

It's a bit like the perpetual motion machine. It is always tantalisingly out of our grasp.

What you speak of is impossible.

The speed of light can never be exceeded and life cannot be created by some alchemical formula.

 

[Oberon]

This frightens me. We can't even control something as simple as an undersea oil well. How can we be absolutely certain that we can control engineered life forms to ensure that they aren't destructive to the environment or to ourselves?

It looks as though we could probably engineer a viable soil bacterium right now. A simple soil bacterium, if mismanaged, could be devastating to us.

I'm all for technology, but this looks dangerous to me and I advise caution... the same degree of caution applied by nuclear engineers.

 

[Stanton Moore]

This frightens me. We can't even control something as simple as an undersea oil well. How can we be absolutely certain that we can control engineered life forms to ensure that they aren't destructive to the environment or to ourselves?

It looks as though we could probably engineer a viable soil bacterium right now. A simple soil bacterium, if mismanaged, could be devastating to us.

I'm all for technology, but this looks dangerous to me and I advise caution... the same degree of caution applied by nuclear engineers.

I agree. This brave new world can easily spin out of control.

 

[Daedalus]

As all things new, this has both positive and negative implications...the same way the kitchen knife does.

and yes..this is not a total-creation of a new life, but more of a modification of an existing one. One has to take baby steps before starting to run

as for the speed of light example, nothing can go faster than the speed of light but, we can use a loophole, by utilizing wormholes.


ps: its my personal belief that within 100-200 years humankind will have achieved immortality in the physical sense....at least immune to death by natural causes...such as disease and aging

life cannot be created by some alchemical formula.

if i rem correctly, the current theory is that it was by Abiogenesis

Abiogenesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


this could one day be replicated in labs.

 

[spin-1/2-nuclei]

This is actually pretty significant as far as scientific advancement goes, basically the DNA of the cell is completely synthetic and self replicates, this gives us an entirely new tool box to play with. As far as creativity goes - "the sky is the limit" - is the phrase that comes to mind. There are dangers associated with this work as well, ethics and caution are definitely important here as was already pointed out by Oberon.

 

[Ming]

It just shows how anything is possible! This is a magnificent scientific discovery though! Now that humans have 'made life', what can humans do with it?

I think the fear most people are talking about aren't 'the making of new life'. It's the 'What we do with the new life' that is worrying people.

 

[raz]

I just hope I'm gone before our world turns into the Terminator.

 

[Lateralus]

This frightens me. We can't even control something as simple as an undersea oil well. How can we be absolutely certain that we can control engineered life forms to ensure that they aren't destructive to the environment or to ourselves?

It looks as though we could probably engineer a viable soil bacterium right now. A simple soil bacterium, if mismanaged, could be devastating to us.

I'm all for technology, but this looks dangerous to me and I advise caution... the same degree of caution applied by nuclear engineers.

I think we need a greater degree of caution. The products of nuclear engineering are not self replicating.

 

[Asterion]

I think we need a greater degree of caution. The products of nuclear engineering are not self replicating.

It is a very similar process though, starting with one, then spontaneously producing more. It needs to be controlled, just as a nuclear reaction is controlled. This should be reasonably easy though, most biological cells are limited by the amount of fuel you give them, and how big a dish you put them in. I'd guess that these variables are very easily controlled, though I could be wrong since I'm not exactly a biologist lol.

I've been reading about this stuff lately, it's funny how much of coincidence this discovery is. I can understand that achieving synthetic life in this fashion would be incredibly difficult, it would presumably be a very very fickle problem, like a computer script, if one single digit is wrong, it can often mess up the entire program. Though cells do have some tolerance to error, because they have mechanisms that nullify defective cells... I think this is also the case with computers

I watched a TED talk about this a couple days ago too, I remember him mentioning that they tried to do this many times, 99 % of their attempts were failures. I'm wondering just how replicable this experiment really is...

 

[figsfiggyfigs]

I'm to tired to write anything cool. This article is pretty much full of brilliance!

This is . AWESOME.

 

[Lateralus]

It is a very similar process though, starting with one, then spontaneously producing more. It needs to be controlled, just as a nuclear reaction is controlled. This should be reasonably easy though, most biological cells are limited by the amount of fuel you give them, and how big a dish you put them in. I'd guess that these variables are very easily controlled, though I could be wrong since I'm not exactly a biologist lol.

I've been reading about this stuff lately, it's funny how much of coincidence this discovery is. I can understand that achieving synthetic life in this fashion would be incredibly difficult, it would presumably be a very very fickle problem, like a computer script, if one single digit is wrong, it can often mess up the entire program. Though cells do have some tolerance to error, because they have mechanisms that nullify defective cells... I think this is also the case with computers

I watched a TED talk about this a couple days ago too, I remember him mentioning that they tried to do this many times, 99 % of their attempts were failures. I'm wondering just how replicable this experiment really is...

I don't think nuclear technology is a good comparison to genetic engineering. Sure, we can cause chain reactions under the right conditions, but we don't get inadvertent chain reactions. I've never heard of any nuclear byproduct going into any kind of spontaneous chain reaction. Life, on the other hand, is completely different.

I think we should take a lesson from what Monsanto has done to the corn in Mexico. Mexico has hundreds of different indigenous corn species. However, genetically modified corn has been inadvertently spread in Mexico. People buy genetically modified corn at the market and some of that corn is dropped on the ground. The genetically modified corn then reproduces, sometimes creating hybrids with the indigenous corn. This is putting stress on the indigenous corn, enough that it's possible that some species could become extinct (or they're bred out of existence). There is no solution to this problem because there is no way to remove all of the genetically modified corn from the environment.

In this particular case the world probably isn't going to end, but it's not unreasonable to believe that some genetically modified life forms could have a much more hazardous effect on the environment, perhaps even a catastrophic effect. I think it's important to always operate under the assumption that whatever life forms you are engineering will escape their containment. What happens when (not if) they do?

 

[Amalgam]

I won't be satisfied until this is weaponized and can eat a man's head.

 

[themightybob]

I dont see how this is any more dangerous than conventional genetic engineering; These sort of fears involving ethics and safety occur anytime a major scientific advancement is made(especially in the field of biology). I think the benefeits of proceeding with the research and application of this new technology outweighs the risks. To advance you must plunge into the unkown, and their is always uncertainty when doing so.

These new organisms will probably have genetic "kill switches" that will destroy the organism upon exiting lab conditions until they have been experimented with thoroughly, then are deemed safe for commercial use.

 

[Lateralus]

These new organisms will probably have genetic "kill switches" that will destroy the organism upon exiting lab conditions until they have been experimented with thoroughly, then are deemed safe for commercial use.

And BP will probably take every precaution to make sure there's no catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, right? No, companies cut corners to save money and they don't always properly assess risk. I don't trust any company to "do the right thing".