Artificial life (General)

by dhw, Friday, May 21, 2010, 11:20 (5112 days ago)

Under the headline "God 2.0 'Defining moment' in science as US researcher creates artificial life", today's Guardian reports that Craig Venter and his team "have created the world's first synthetic life form in an experiment that paves the way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved. The feat has occupied 20 scientists for more than 10 years at an estimated cost of $40m."-It turns out that "the organism is based on an existing bacterium that causes mastitis in goats, but at its core is an entirely synthetic genome that was constructed from chemicals in the laboratory."-This might seem to be the sort of breakthrough that Matt has been hoping for, though perhaps our scientists can explain to me how an organism based on an existing bacterium can be described as "creating artificial life". -A second article describes the process used: the team "began with a computer reconstruction of the genome of a common bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides. The information was fed into a DNA synthesizer, which produced short strands of the bug's DNA. These strands were then stitched together by inserting them first into yeast and then into E coli bacteria. The bugs' natural repair mechanisms saw the strands as broken fragments and reassembled them. After several rounds, the scientists had pieced together all 1m letters of the bacterium's genome. To mark the genome as synthetic, they spliced in fresh strands of DNA, each a biological "watermark" that would do nothing in the final organism except carry coded messages. [...] The crucial step came next. The scientists took the synthetic genome and transferred it into another common bug. As this bug multiplied, some of its progeny ditched their own DNA and began using the synthetic genome. Then the transformation began."-The result is a new species, and Venter calls it synthetic because "it survives thanks to a manmade genome." Again, that seems to me a long way from the claim that he has created artificial life. All the same, I'd be interested to know how significant everyone thinks this breakthrough is from a scientific, philosophical, and moral point of view. Meanwhile, according to the article, it's the commercial point of view that comes uppermost for Venter, as he is setting out to create organisms that are not only new, but also lucrative. A deal with ExxonMobil is potentially worth trillions of dollars.