Slashdot Mirror
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.
When I read the headline this morning I thought it was going to be entirely from scratch, but the article says that they're "just" (like it's not still amazing we can do this) going to take an existing organism, and strip it of most of its DNA until they get down to the bare minimum required to sustain life. So I don't know if I'd necessarily call it "creating" life, because it seems to be more of the same modifying existing life people have been doing for a while now.
....the scientists reckon that these critters can develop their OWN infectious responses. So, they're building in a failsafe....
4-minute lifespan.
Frankenstein was a story. It was fiction. And so was Jurassic Park, and so was Gattaca. I won't comment on the Bible here, although my view of that book is probably pretty clear from the context
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
First thing that popped into my head when I read this was the Oingo-Boingo 'Weird Science' theme. Dates me pretty soundly, I guess.
This here is the time to start thinking about everything science fiction has ever told us when dealing with artificaial life. It's one of the few sub-genres of science fiction that's almost always cautionary... from 'Frankenstein'--
"FIRST POST... BAAAAD!!"
--to 'Species'--
"That hole in his back makes him look just like the goatse.cx guy... except it's because his spine was torn out."
Man will create life. There's no doubt about it. It's a given. Eventually, we'll no doubt even create life that looks, acts, and feels human. What we should never forget, however, is that we are stepping into territory where angels fear to tread and should take each action with only after gut-wrenching, soul-searching thought.
Is it resonsible, moral, or ethical to create life when the planet is as overcrowded as it is?
Is it ethical to create life that can feel, think, or be hurt when you *know* we're going to dissect and vivisect of what we create?
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?
This is a wonderful new field of science that has incredible potential for human advancement. It also has incredible potential for misuse and unethical behavior.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
No, you're the only one to whom it seems incredibly foolish. Well, okay, you and a bunch of other fools.
As I said in another post, no one raises these objections with physics, or chemistry, or math, despite things like, oh, say, the atomic bomb. All scientific research is potentially dangerous. But stopping research because of some vague fear, or some pseudo-philosophical-religious claptrap like "some things are better off left alone" (what things exactly? Be specific) would leave us in the Dark Ages.
Jellyfish don't do scientific research. No jellyfish has ever built an atomic bomb, or engineered a dangerous virus, true. But would you rather be a jellyfish, or a human being?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yes, we are here...
Not to be cynical but when will man reallize that playing god never pays off!
Star Thistle is commonly found in California fields only it's not native and it wasn't put there on purpose. It has displaced the local grasses almost completely in some areas. This is only one of thousands of examples of non-native species that have infested new (to them) environments.
All environments will be new to this critter. That makes the "scary" part, to me anyway, the fact that if this were to escape and survive it would displace something else with absolutely unknown consequences. We are completely dependant on our environment's biology for breathable air and edible food so it's pretty damn important that we don't accidentally (no one would even _consider_ doing it purposely, would they?) introduce some species that will screw it up.
I'm not saying we shouldn't experiment. I'm just saying that everyone should have a healthy dose of fear over this particular kind of experiment.
TW
There are two basic approaches to medical research. The first is the "shotgun" approach -- throw a bunch of chemicals at a disease and find one that stops the disease process without killing the patient. This approach has led to some great successes over the last century or so, but the problem is, as far as we can tell, we've just about discovered everything we're going to discover by this method. The easy stuff has been done.
The other approach, the molecular approach, is to figure out how life works -- and, of great interest from the medical applications point of view, how it goes wrong -- from the ground up, and try to use that knowledge to build new treatments. That's what these guys are doing. I can almost guarantee you that when a cure for cancer or AIDS is found, it will come from this approach.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You're against basic research?
My favourite physics teacher used to say that if the energy commisions of 19th century should've chosen between a project on more effecient candles and one on studying the relationship between magnetism and electricity they'd probably opted for the former.
Basic research does provide practical solutions - only on a longer time scale.
Back in the '70s, GM stripped the engine from and Oldsmobile so that they were left with an empty engine compartment. Then, in that same lab that resembled nothing like a petri dish, they inserted a Chevy engine. POOF! They had just created a new car from scratch!
"How do you expect me to see the forest with all these damn trees in the way?!"
If you want to make a car you need to define "what is a car", so far so good ... If you want to make "life" they will first need to define what exactly the criteria are before we can call one of their siblings "life".
Is it life because it moves,breathes, contains other cells, eats, sleeps, breeds, farths, burps ??
At which point exactly do we call an life ?
That is exactly what I thought when I read the article. They are not creating a life-form; they are only ripping out its DNA and seeing if it still lives with their specific, customized, meticulously built DNA (which just happens to be based on the original DNA). The article says nothing of removing any of the cell's machinery, only the DNA. So, in essence, they will be extracting the DNA and constucting an exact copy with a third or so of the genes missing from it.
Of course, no matter what they do they have to start from -something-, but in this example they are starting from an already living bacteria and rebuilding its DNA. All they are really going to find out is if the process will kill the bacteria or not.
Despite the fact that this experiment won't really prove anything if it succeeds, there will be many people saying that they did in fact create new life and that if they can do it in the lab, then it must be incredibly easy for life to have come into existence on its own on billions of other worlds throughout the universe.
--
"There's no other intelligent life in the universe. There isn't even very much of it on earth."
I don't think there are "some things better off left alone." I do think I have provided an example of a scientific experiment with a valid ethical question. I also think we should have some idea of the ramifications of our actions before we proceed on any endeavor, and I think it's reasonable to ask that these scientists think long and hard before moving forward. Not because we as humans don't have a right to do such a thing, but because they are dealing with complex systems, and their safeguards may fail in unexpected ways. While I would never say, "We don't have the right to know this," it may be prudent to say, "We're not ready to do this yet."
Brevity is the soul of wit
-- Polonius
Not to be cynical but when will man reallize that playing god never pays off!
While it is certainly true that this experiment raises some ethical issues, I think your comment does even more so. I might be feeding a troll, but I would still like to point out that your argument is very weak.
Imagine the caveman Ugh showing the other caveman Ugh2 how to light a fire. Ugh gets a little burnt in the process and Ugh2 comments "when will man reallize that playing god never pays off".
I mean if we want to understand life experiments like the one in the article are probably necessary. The ethical issue is not (as I see it) that the scientists are messing with the DNA of some micro-organism (=playing god), but the fact that their results might be used for producing biological weapons.
Get your own space, your own moonlight, your own particle-wave guides...
If nothing else, God is our bootloader.
Did anyone else catch this obvious question? Do scientists have the right create life? Well, can they have childern without people fretting over some frankenstien killer virus child springing fully evil out of their groins? I don't believe anyone is challenging their ability to procreate, which by definition is creating life, so I don't see why are we asking these kind of idiodic questions. We should be far more concerned with why we let non-scientists procreate! Creating a rogue human is far more dangerous than creating a rogue crotch burning bacteria.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
Your caution is well advised.
If anything is obvious and plainly evident, it is that mankind has not done the most commendable job of managing the current set of life forms on planet earth.
If there are overly many human beings for our existing biosphere and too many of them are living unhappy lives, then producing other sentient life forms is not likely to improve things, unless they eat septic sludge and excrete something that counts as food to us.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
We are meddling with forces we do not comprehend,
Yes. The technical name for such meddling is "science".
It's an ethical problem. For very religious people such experiments would equal to the most arrogant attempt for humans recreating the Creation. Even if it is inside a lab, such event would leave a huge teological hole on one of the most canonical religious doctrines: that life is somehow "different" from other physical phenomena and could only be created in very exceptional circumstances by an omnipotent being.
Since the XIX century, we have seen how the crumbling of this "truth" is painfully received among several religions. Since Darwin and Pasteur, every step that closes nears the biotic and anabiotic world is not easy for believers. Many dogmas put living beings in a special place. Besides, humans are put in a more special place. However, the rising of Evolutionism blurred the human-living beings division. Meanwhile while we got closer and closer to the abiotic world, no one could ever mix up inorganic components and bring out an alien crawling outta the lab. So many creationists hang to this last frontier and consider it as "proof" that Life was created by someone. However the new experiments may blur this division to the impossible.
Since I'm hardly an expert in medicine I won't make any guesses about which specific diseases could be cured if the inner workings of a cell were known. However I am sure that this knowledge would certainly be useful for this purpose. If this justifies carrying out such an experiment is a question everyone has to consider themselves. I personally think it's worth doing. I feel more comfortable with this kind of information being general knowledge in the medical community rather than having some hostile party carry out these same experiments by themselves and have a weapon that none but them know how to remedy.
What you say about Einstein and e=mc^2 misses the point a little bit. I agree that nuclear weapons have been used with terrible effects, but only for a few times. One could argue that the fact that there hasn't been any world wars since the introduction of nuclear weapons is because nobody dares to start one fearing the nuclear revenge. This is, by the way, the reason why the Nobel prizes are given, Alfred Nobel believed that world peace would be achieved if there were a frightning enough weapon. Then people would be discouraged from fighting wars. Therefore every year an award is given to researchers who have contributed to reaching this goal.
And you certainly can't deny that nuclear fission has been used for peaceful purposes.
Why do you assume that such life forms would be sentient? Just creating basic micro-organisms is an incredible challenge, and creating a basic micro-organism is what we're trying to do here. Making a sentient, multicellular organism is so far in our future compared to this experiment, it's incredible. It's like saying that Marie Curie was trying to build a cold fusion reactor.
I'm suprised and dissapointed at the number of kneejerk luddites in this thread who automatically make some magical connection between micro-organisms(ie. simple life, the kind which first formed several billion years ago), and human life(ie. complex life, the kind which formed several hundred million years ago), and therefore declare that all experiments of this type are dangerous. Creating simple life forms is merely a means to the end of learning more of our origins -- knowlege which is important in the grand scheme of our understanding of the universe.
It's been a long time.
A joke, but typical of how religion deals with science: once science topples a divine bastion, religion is quick to come up with another one.
- First they promoted the flat earth
- Then they promoted the Terra-centric planetary system.
- Then they promoted the young earth theory.*
- Then they denied evolution.**
- Then they said only god could make life.
- Now they say only god can make dirt.
Religion will always be able to regroup and criticize, without offering anything other than mircales and mythology. Remember how the Democrats lost this mid-term, by criticizing with no real substance? So will science eventually obviate the need for all creationist religions by eventually leaving religion with so little ground to stand on, no one will take it's claims seriously!
As an athiest, and IMHO, the only "religions" science won't dismantle are the Theravada Buddhists and Confuscists, because they don't make such gross claims.
* (There's a childrens book for Christians that claims t-rex's teeth were used for cracking nuts, and that they got along with men before original sin.)
** (Of course, finches and antibiotics put this to rest. Fortunately the Roman Catholics were smart enough to reverse course up to this point, just look at rights of ordainment, revised in 1987.)
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Actually, according to a Catholic theologian when asked about this, to "play God" you would have to invent the rules then sit back and watch what happens within the rules. What we do is try to figure out what the rules are and then do everything we can within them. So trying to create life within the rules that we've got is not "plyaing God" but "playing Man".
Nope, no sig