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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.
And if the scientists in question are not interested in those areas? What do you suggest - making it illegal to fund "non-important" science? Who would have the say on what is important? And how exactly do you then stop those affected scientists from continuing their work at a university in another country, rather than toeing to the line and doing 'important' stuff? The science community is by it's nature a pretty mobile bunch of people; it's built into the system that spending time at other universities and other countries is seen as a good thing and a boon to one's career.
This is a parallel to those advocating the joining of competing open-source projects. It won't work to mandate what people work with there, and it won't work here. In both cases, people are working on what they do (or financing the work) because they find it fascinating and important, and no matter what others say they should be doing they will continue doing what they do.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
No one ever brings these [moral] arguments up in chemistry, or physics, or math
I think Einstein would have disagreed with you.
An excellent overview of minimum-gene-set research is here...
The hypothesis that "chemistry explains all of life" is nearly universal in science, yet is not fully proven yet (though I believe it). The ultimate test of the chemistry hypothesis is be to construct life from inert chemicals off the shelf. The closest one got was the constuction of a polio virus from regeants earlier this year. The virus appeared viable, but was about a thousand times less potent than its natural version. The simplest life form, as described in this article, is about 20-50 times more complicated than a virus in terms of genes and chemicals (proteins, sugars, others).
The alternative hypothesis is "neo-vitalism" or that is some mysterious substance or force outside of pure chemistry. This was the prevailing hypothesis until well into the 19th century. But it keeps on reappearing in more "scientific" forms today. One statement is the "only living material can produce living matter", even though you can fully explain all the chemistry, physics, and genetics. Another version callled "morphogensis" is that there are "patterns" in lving matter that are transmitted from ancestor to descendent. Yet another version, championed by physicist Roger Penrose is that there is secret unknown physics involved (clarification: he specificiation is attributing human consciousness to a new form of quantum interaction). Still another variation is "holism" or "emergism" which states the totally is greater than the sum of the parts, i.e. a reductionistic explanation is necessarily incomplete.
Note the relation of life to matter is a very old philosophical problem. The ancient Greek story of Pygmalian, the medival Golem, and the 186 year old Frankenstein novel all addressed this issue.
An auxilary problem is artificial intelligence. Its seem obvious that this can be done by us computer geeks. But 55 years of effort have had disappointing results. Some people use similar arguments against artificial life against artificial intelligence.
Your comment is a particularly stupid one that not only shows a lack of knowledge on the field of science, but of the personalities of human beings. There is no overlord scientific authority that directs what each and every scientist in the world should be working on. Science is very much an individual pursuit. You learn about what you are interested in or what you accidentally discover. A good scientist is a highly motivated scientist, not one forced to work on a project he/she has very little interest in.
We have plenty of scientists working on both AIDS and Cancer. If we were to stop all other pursuits until all disease were eradicated our overall standard of living would be much lower due to a lack of innovation in every other field. I suppose just because there's still rabies in the world you think that no scientist should be working on fuel cells, or just because a cure for lupus has been found no one should care a rats ass about developing more efficent supply chain methods...etc.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
This is actually kind of ironic. Our understanding of physics (general relativity and quantum mechanics, and all the floppy connective bits we've tried to stick in between) breaks down rather badly around singularities--black holes (if they exist). If anything, these protesters should be cheering the existence of black holes. They're sort of like God's practical joke on physicists.
~Idarubicin