Artificial life (General)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, May 26, 2010, 03:11 (5294 days ago) @ dhw

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."
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> 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."
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> 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". 
> -It's a definite step in the right direction. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to drill backwards further. We need successful abiogenesis--in any way we can. What has happened here is groundbreaking but isn't "life from scratch" as the headlines claim. They're just using mechanisms that already exist. The DNA was built from scratch, but that too, was coding for specific (known) genes. -> 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."
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> 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.-What I think? It ushers in a world of mass-produced bacteria. Bacteria built to withstand high alcohol concentrations could smash the problem of mass-producing ethanol without touching food supplies. They could also solve the problem of breaking down cellulose into ethanol... this breakthrough by itself has the potential to completely overturn oil, and really--there's nothing that can be done about it. So yeah, oil companies will jump on this quickly. To be honest, it's nothing in terms of origin of life, but I really think it will pave the road in that direction. -I'm wanting to see something much more wild and off the wall than this.

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\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"