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Scientists Attempting to Create Simple Life Form
derubergeek writes "The Washington Post is reporting on an apparently credible project to create a simple life form in a petri dish. The goal is two-fold: 1) to actually create a unique life form essentially from scratch and (more importantly) 2) to extensively analyze and model the entire biology of this critter. Exciting and scary at the same time. From the article, it sounds as if they are quite wary of their project and fascinated at the same time. I usually refer to that sensation as 'That little voice that I should have listened to...'" There's also a NY Times article.
The project will begin with M. genitalium, a minuscule organism that lives in the genital tracts of people and may cause or contribute to some cases of urethritis, an inflammation of the urethra. The scientists will remove all genetic material from the organism, then synthesize an artificial string of genetic material, resembling a naturally occurring chromosome, that they hope will contain the minimum number of M. genitalium genes needed to sustain life. The artificial chromosome will be inserted into the hollowed-out cell, which will then be tested for its ability to survive and reproduce.
They're taking an already extant organism, "hollowing it out" as it were, and seeing if it can live and reproduce normally with a series of increasingly customized (and minimal) genetic material. Not creating something from nothing.
You are thinking of the Miller-Urey Experiment.
In the '50s they put some simple chemicals (methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water) in a sealed vessel and added energy (as electrical discharges). They found about 2% of the material formed amino acids.
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
The minimum number of genes required for an organism to survive has been a topic of interest for several years. An excellent semi-technical overview of this effort was produced by The National Academy of Sciences...
The closest one got was the constuction of a polio virus from regeants earlier this year. The virus appeared viable,
Viruses are not usually considered to be organisms. And Roger Penrose is not usually considered to be a biologist.
If you read the article to the end, it says why. This cell has the least number of genes of any organism known, so it is easier to reduce this to a basic minimal set than something more complex. The whole point of the experiment is to get the absolute minimum requirement of genes for basic cellular operations. So a this creature is ideally suited as it is already the most minimal set found in nature.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
This is a regular straw man attack. The original, informative post didn't claim viruses were living organisms (in fact, it specifically said that viruses were 20-50x less complex than the simplest forms of life), and it called Penrose a physicist. So how is this response relevant in any way?
Savant
The paper you talk about (Cello, Paul and Wimmer, Science 297: 1016-1018) describes the de novo synthesis of Poliovirus. The authors used polymerases in a cell-free system to translate synthetic cDNA derived from the entire polio genome. The synthetic virus did not differ significantly from the wild-type phenotype (i.e., it was not a "1000 times less potent"). Admittedly, the polymerases used were ultimately of biological origin; however there was no force vital that hindered the synthetic poliovirus. Article specifically states that vitalism was shattered, and that poliovirus is "a chemical with a life cycle". Quo vadis, neovitalism?
And the rest of your troll goes downhill from there. "Life begets life" dates back to the mid-19th century, and is an empirical observation that countered hypotheses like maggots spontaneously arising from rotting meat.
Morphogenesis is a genuine scientific concept, but there is nothing mysterious about it. These "patterns" you speak of, they sound strangely like "genes", don't they? Hmm.
I could find no reference to Penrose and a quantum description of human consciousness. This sounds bogus to me, but even if he did seriously make that claim, human consciousness is in no way a prerequisite for life. A bacterium or an earthworm has no human consciousness.
And finally emergism. Certainly, in living organisms, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The whole can replicate, while the parts cannot. Living organisms are emergent systems, but there is nothing mysterious about emergent systems per se.
The relation of life to matter is indeed an old philosophical problem. My own religion (Hinduism) has some very interesting perspectives on the divisions between mind, matter and spirit. However this has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I am not personally qualified to talk about AI and whether are not it is feasible. However, judging from the rest of your post, I doubt your competence in that field of human endeavor as well.
My other sig is also a
Is it ethical or responsible to create life, when we know that we're already making serious mistakes in genetic engineering, such as the genes that recently jumped between soya and corn?
/. editors not reading the story well enough to create a decent headline.
I think we covered this in the "Gene jumping" thread. The gene's didn't jump, the two seperate products were mixed together, as solids, and so some of the genetically modifed stuff got in with the non genetically modified stuff and when ingested, poff. The genes are merged. Or some such nonsense. The article had nothing to do with genes jumping speceies. Just another case of
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They did it already with Polio.
A virus is not a cell, and does not have the fundamental operations of a cell. The whole point of this experiment is to determine what genes are responsible for what cellular processes, and how the chains of cascading protein-interactions lead from a set of genes to a set of cellular functions. Therefore it would be pointless to use a virus.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
The Miller-Urey experiment does show that random energy into a specific set of simple chemicals can yield amino acids.
However, it did not produce all amino acids required for life as we know it. Moreover, there is no known chemical pathway to go from a bunch of amino acids to DNA/RNA. Plus there is also significant debate about whether the initial atmosphere they began with existed on Earth at the time of the origins of life.
Other researchers have suggested that inoganic forms of proto-life (crystal growth) may have had a role in the catalysis of organic chemicals to actually get to something leading to RNA/DNA.
I'm not saying that there is anything particularly magic about the formation of life, just that Miller-Urey is a very small part of a very big question.
Nature has put into DNA many checks and switches to prevent rampant mutations, which the humans will not bother to put in, or won't be aware of. Organism loose, mutating at will, and you got yourself a killer strain of urinary infection-causing organisms.
Speaking generally, those checks are not placed in the organisms to protect the greater biosphere, as you implicitly claim. Why would urinary tract bacteria put in mutation controls if by removing them they could become a "killer strain", vastly more successful? Sounds like it's all gravy for the urinary bacteria, no?
The real reason those checks exist is that in general, mutation is bad. As you make a given generation take on more and more mutations, the probability approaches 1 that at least one of those mutations will be fatal. This is a slight oversimplication, but the probability that two mutations "cancel" or that one buffers the other, while non-zero, is even smaller then the odds of one mutation being neutral or beneficial, and can be ignored, especially as the number of mutations in a given offspring increases (because it takes those small probabilities and starts raising them to large powers, sending them to 0). As you get up into the tens, hundreds, or thousands of mutations (that aren't on introns), the organism just isn't going to survive that.
Thus, mankind will indeed need to copy those checks and balances, or his organisms will swiftly die. In fact, almost anything we could "build" right now would swiftly die in the real world, which is immensely more hostile to life now then it was several billion years ago. That may sound wierd, but it's true; show any weakness (AIDS, for instance) and any of millions of types of bacteria, animal parasites, insects, fungi, viruses, and assorted other nasties are literally ready to eat you for lunch, all of which you can currently repel, come to some form of balance with, or avoid for the most part. It will be a long time before Man creates anything truly original, and even longer before it is strong enough to threaten anything seriously.