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Life Made to Order
Roland Piquepaille writes "When he was president of Celera Genomics, Craig Venter was the leader of the private project which deciphered the human genome. Now, he has another goal: create custom-made organisms -- one DNA letter at a time. 'Venter's objective is not merely to tweak existing life forms by inserting genes that confer specific traits -- the main tactic in conventional genetic engineering. Instead he wants to assemble an entire genome, DNA letter by DNA letter, putting together only the genes he wants: those necessary for an organism's survival and those that will allow it to carry out a desired task.' If successful, maybe in a decade, this could yield new sources of energy or novel drugs. Venter is not alone in this quest. Other institutions, private companies or universities, have similar efforts under development. Check this column for a summary of this eye-opening -- but quite long -- Technology Review article."
Actually, the irony of your statement is that we're going to need better nano-technology to complete the task. As enthusiastic as these companies are, the problems in intentionally constructing a DNA molecule letter by letter are huge: notably, if you screw up in one spot, you can have tremendous problems.
Further, there's no "spell check" for them, using current methods. They wouldn't know they had a problem until they start letting it reproduce, only to find that they have an [apparently] inexplicably error, possibly making the organism unviable.
Whats needed is sophisticated enough nanobots that will be able to not only perform the construction of the DNA, but to "spell check" it by running up and down its length continually, comparing it against the desired pattern.
"Stumble before you crawl"
I heard about scientists trying to create a new type of organism a little while ago... It scared me then and it scares me now.
However, I would think that it would be totally possible to generate TONS of energy and other useful things from something like this. It might be possible to generate oil from sunlight. Huge tanks of stuff making food, energy, whatever.
The ethical complications are interesting.
If you create a new life form, do you have the right to destroy it? Maybe. If you can re-create it at a whim, why not? But then, what about existing life forms? Eventually scientists might be able to re-create just about any species in a petri dish. Can they then justifiably destroy a species, since they can re-create it at any time?
Cool sci-fi... or more accurately, cool sci-soon-to-be-not-fi.
Soon actually.
E.g., MIT ran a lab course on this stuff in January
http://web.mit.edu/synbio/www/iap/
If the possibilities don't scare you, I don't think you're paying attention. There are a lot of fundamentalists (of whatever ilk) out there that would like to kill large groups of people (if not all of us), and if this becomes technically and economically feasible, we're going to be in real trouble.
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Why is it that when I read this article I thought "man creates great organism, great organism is too great, great organism kills man?"
Maybe it's just the product of too many science fiction movies.
bwah-ha-ha-ha
Given that these organisms will be hand made by scientists using existing genes I would say that, no, there isn't any danger.
For a very, very long time organisms have been thinking of ways to kill, parisitize, and otherwise screw their competition. Even the simpleist disease virus or bacteria is a master peice of inconcievable sybtlety by the standards of what we can cerate in test tubes this way.
The organisms in the article, on the other hand will be very, very simple. They won't even have unexpressed genes that could turn on and cause problems. Before we worry about these things turning into weapons, I'd like to see one capable of surviving outside a peti dish or growth tank.
The real danger from genetic engineering comes from the alteration of existing masterpieces like influenza, AIDS, Ebola, etc. A recent accident in Australia shows that it is possible to make diseases more deatly by simple alterations (in the example cuasing death in rabits rather than sterility).
Nanotechnology also presents dangers, since it allows us to make organisms out of things more robust than sugar, protien, and lipids; but that still seems to be decades in the future.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.