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Synthetic Life In The Lab
niktesla writes "Scientific American is carrying a story about
sythetic life - genetic engineered "machines" made from DNA building blocks called "BioBricks". The goal is to produce a library of building blocks that can be assembled to give predictable results. Reminds me of the technology behind Blade Runner's replicants."
There's this thing called fiction where you don't have to tell the truth, then there's this thing called science fiction where you can just make anything you like up.
Then there's this thing called real life which just sucks because you can't make any of it up. Though someone should tell that to Tony Blair.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Probably stating the obvious here, but once this gets dependable and easy to form to different needs, "BioBricks" might spell the end of people dying due to lack of suitable organ donors.
I think we will rather see that before we see any horror scenarios like "Blade Runner like replicant slaves".
Hello Skynet...hello Blade Runner...and all the other sci-fi prophecies we were warned about in the past.
I for one welcome...well, you know the drill.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
"Scientific American is carrying a story about sythetic life...."
Trypo!
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Lego Starts Suing?
"Is life merely a convenient arrangement of cells or is it necessary to have a "spark of life" or the "soul" to bring bring the cells to "life"?"
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
as long as we don't know how to take care of the non-artificial kind of life I think we should stay the hell away from introducing artificial kinds.
Just think about what *one* lab escaped 'pregnant' self replicating lifeform could do to our ecology. We're doing enough harm as it is, no need to bypass 4 billion years (sorry creationists) of evolution of the predator-prey relationship.
Or would you like your tap to give you 'green scum' instead of water ?
MP3 Search Engine
Does anyone actually argue that grass has a soul? Look up the thalamus, it evolved in vertabrates and is likely where this "spark of consciousness" is.
-I am an elective eunuch.
1. Using a whole population of cells to fine tune the level of control. Source: You et al, "Programmed population control by cell-cell communication and regulated killing", Nature 428, pp868-871.
2. Writing a "compiler" for translating high level instructions (blink on and off at 2 Hz) into biobricks. Source: personal communication with Rodney Brooks.
It makes us happy parents of children better than us (every parents dream).
When are we going to get real interoperable building blocks for software? And I don't mean STL for C++ or CPAN for Perl. I mean building blocks, LEGO-like (or civil-engineering-like) for building software. Anybody up to the task? :)
Additionally, I would consider clones to be synthetic life. Any life arising from the hand of man is de facto synthetic, IMHO.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
will it be released in GPL?
> I think we will rather see that before we see any horror scenarios like "Blade Runner like replicant slaves".
No jokes there. When the baby boomers die off, and they will, we're going to need replacements for many key positions that nobody will want to do. Janitorial, factory, septic and other unsavory positions will need filling, and there will be a huge vacuum in these positions as companies hire up people for more and more office (thinking) jobs. Allan Watts, the renowned philosopher, suggested that we have the means to create a subservient robot race to serve us in this capacity. Maybe these Bio Bricks are another step towards his dream?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Pretty soon we can have a real living lego maniac (tm)
Sweet.
Get off his case for mispelling sithetic. If I were you, I'd be more worried about one of these sith things getting loose from the lab and coming after you.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It's probably just a Syntetic virus.
MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts:
http://parts.mit.edu/
As mentioned in the article.
Given the fact that we haven't even yet created a single bacterium from scratch (the closest we've come is to "bum out" all the optional instructions from one of the simplest known naturally-occuring bacteria to create the simplest possible bacterium we could think of), how long will it be before we have this hot new vapourware biotech? Wake me when it's over... oh, in about 20 YEARS. Yet more speculative flimflam.
Incidentally, what in the heck does this tech have to do with Blade Runner? Blade Runner replicants were seemingly composed of individual organs and tissues grown de novo in labs and vats (e.g. the eyes in Chu's "Eye World"). Blade Runner replicants are built of "organ bricks", not "DNA bricks" as being discussed here. Jesus Christ...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Everytime some new advance in bio-tech get's posted the gadget geeks and code pushers get ramped up into a ludite rage against this new evil threat to civilization itself.
Maybe if some of the readers who find themselves espousing the peril of eco-terror that awaits due to "mans ignoble tinkering with what it best left untouched" applied that same feverous perspective at lawmakers who vote for things like the DMCA and Patriot Act, they might find they have something in common.
Popcorn anyone?
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such artificial-life films as "Species 2: Electric Boogaloo" and "The Al Gore Story".
Ahm.. can anyone enlighten us in plain english if this is about that so-called 'Biologic Computer' we've read about last year? I can't recall the technology used on that one and I'm sure most readers with no background in genetics have similar questions.
...beginning of the end. This is the good first stab at a systematic approach to bio-engineering, which of course can lead to robust theories. The scary part is the potential for 'virus' creation; it's inconceivable that the technology could be sequestered into "good hands" indefinitely.
The evolutionary aspects of this were also intriguing. This will provide material for a substantial test of Bill Dembski's theories about the limitations of evolutionary algorithms. These theories have become important (if true) in several areas, including NIST's attempt to create self-driving cars.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Where could this lead? Hackers starting to move into the bioengineering realm.... Pretty soon, they are creating self-replicating destructive life forms that actually attack people instead of computer systems. They would likely name these things "worms" and "virii" after the computer programs that do something similar.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
We have yet to create anything without using pre-existing atoms also. It is easy to find a fault in everything so STOP WHINNING.
She might not make much mistakes, but when she does, well, those little mishaps are remembered for a very long time.
Sorry, already been done. That red dude 2nd from the left looks a little like Hellboy, doesn't he?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Does this mean we'll also see bio-pop ups for pr0n, bio-spy ware, and viruses? Considering the amount of bad software churned out by business, perhaps we don't want them 'programming' organisms? Maybe this is something to leave locked in the lab and not try to find applications.
I've got a bio-popup already. It is invoked upon visual contact with images of Jennifer Garner.
... India's outsourcing boom because corportations will soon be able to assemble 100% compliant personnel from off the shelf parts. Think of it, legions of mindless corporate drones who do not have to be paid a salary and can be recycled into hotdogs to feed the remaining workforce when they become redundant.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Think on them as working as metacatalizers to enable very hard to do for conventional methods chemical products. Or as detectors, not only for TNT as they said there, but also as more trustable than current applications using i.e. animals (dogs to discover drugs). Or as filters, they could assimilate some elements and maybe concentrate them.
Another nice thing about the article is the concept of building blocks. Maybe in a future could, on demand (i.e. an authomatic system), make an specific one to react under certain conditions (i.e. to clean some dangerous contaminator).
In the minus side, working with self-replicating things could be risky. If things goes off control and there is no "shutdown" mechanism (i.e. they die in an environment with O2) the potential for a big disaster could be high
Speak for yourself.
- K. Wojtyla, Rome
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
or at least a really, really long time, if I promise I'll never reproduce (and voluntarily undergo surgery to make sure of it?)
I'm not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of not getting to do everything I wanted to before it happens.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
If you change that to Mr Coffee IV (intravenous) into the bone marrow, you might become a millionaire.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The works of Jules Verne were science fiction, but it didn't take very long for them to be adapted into the real world.
Learn something new.
Given the fact that we haven't even yet created a single bacterium from scratch...
I'm no bio-engineering expert but we have created a synthetic virus, synthetic blood vessels, synthetic hormones, and even have made some progress towards synthetic organs. Granted, it's not quite creating life, but if you aren't impressed you are either an incurable cynic or doesn't understand the technology. (and probably both) Give it time. Just because we can't do something now doesn't mean we can't enjoy speculating about what might be possible.
What was the technology behind Blade Runner's replicants? Maybe I missed the part in the movie where they explained all that.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I think most of us would consider an organism to be synthetic if it's built from scratch with non-living components.
So the question becomes, can one build a "living" (i.e. identical to a natural) virus from only the parts that make it up? In other words, would a virus, or any living thing, become alive once someone puts together all the parts in exactly the same way?
And then some might still say that just because it acts identical to the naturally occuring organism doesn't mean it's alive. It acts alive, but nature didn't give it a soul.
I think we'll end up with more questions than answers, more debate than decisions.
Developers: We can use your help.
A silicon (or Ge or GeAs, etc.) lifeform could last much longer, survive higher levels of radiation, operate in harsh environments (space, Mars, etc.).
If we design them to reproduce, our days are numbered.
Other famous mistakes made by the Divine...
"640 billion neurons should be enough for anybody"
I think people really need to 1) stop having children...
Humans seem to naturally decrease reproductive rates when necessary. Excluding cultural factors, like some expecting couples to have as many children as possible to provide for the parents, people will have less children as overcrowding occurs. I'm not sure of the cultural influence, but the birth rate in Japan has slowed over the years. In metropolitan areas like NYC fewer couples have children. Studies have shown it's a natually occurring phenomenon without any conscious decisions being made.
Of course in some places cultural factors are a bigger influence, so it will have to be a conscious change over time.
Developers: We can use your help.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Or the end of people dying altogether?
Organ replacement can not eliminate all naturally occurring deaths. People will allow any organ to be replaced except for one: the brain. The rest of the body can live or be replaced with better parts, but the brain will not last forever. Either regenerative processes need to be developed or the brain needs to become downloadable. If we could recreate nerve cells exactly as needed or download a mind from one brain into another then we might be able to end natural death.
Developers: We can use your help.
Before you all get carried away with this, a few things to note:
This is a bacterial genome. What is currently being produced is isolated sets of parts of the genome that have been cataloged as having specific functions in a bacteria. These 'blocks' could be put together, if you knew how to regulate all of them, and you were smart enough to add all the neccesary components for replication.
This sort of information is already known for some bacteria. There is a very small amount of DNA in bacterial genomes, and it's easy to sequence. On top of that, it's easier to figure out exactly what a particular bit of sequence does, so this is just creating a one stop shop to look up particular coding sequences.
What this *isn't* is a eukaryotic genome. You aren't going to be putting together complex organisms this way in our lifetime. We don't even know what the VAST majority of the genome does. Do you remember the phrase 'junk dna'? We're now figuring out that the 'junk' actually has function, and there's even been a case where a mutation in intronic DNA has been shown to cause disease. Life is much more complicated in organisms larger than bacteria, and it's going to take the rest of our lives to reverse engineer complex life, much less begin to design it from scratch.
So, the take home message: It's cool, and it may be useful for bacteria. We're not going to grow organisms, people, tissue, organs, etc with this idea.
All this cloning and nanotech! I can't wait until I can clone myself, send him to work, while I sit home and post on Slashdot!
I know it turned out bad for Fred on the Flintstones but that's just a cartoon.
There's plenty of "prior art" that will make a patent kinda difficult. Let's just say that I'm already manufacturing bio-bricks at a rate of one or two a day, as are a number of people I know..
Why are they messing around with genetics? Seeing how genetics and the general theory of evolution is all about mutation. mutation = unpredictable. By the time they get it down to "predictable" on the human organ level we would all be long dead. Also, someone said that it would be bad if poeple lived till 180. The wold food supply always has and always will controll the world population. I dont see that changing with the max human lifespan.
It seems like a natural progress of artificial life and as such reminds me more about Tierra than Blade Runner's replicants. If you don't know Tierra, there is an interesting description on Wikipedia:
It is very important to remember that given sufficient space and complexity, the difference between carbon-based form of life as we know it and any "artificial" form thereof is only that of a medium. Very interesting read. I hope it will go much further during the next few years and we will see some unimaginable implications of this new idea.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
This is a tragically popular misconception, especially amongst that part of the nerd herd that hasn't studied enough philosophy. Science+technology has been a great success, sure, but it has in no way demonstrated that "what you can measure is all that there is". On the contrary: what you can measure is all that science can deal with. There may well be such a thing as a soul or a spirit, but unless we can measure it, we'll never have a science related to it.
The idea, "all you can measure is all there is", is a metaphysical statement (a philosophical claim of the grandest sort, IMO) congruent with the position known as materialism. The assumption that "there's no mystery... that cannot be apprehended" (by science) is a tenet of scientism, not science. It's just a way of saying, "I don't believe that anything exists which transcends our ability to analyse scientifically". You can believe that if it pleases you to do so, but you're utterly deluded if you think science has demonstrated anything of the sort. Such demonstrations are beyond the power and scope of science; philosophers of metaphysics might get there eventually, but given progress in the field to date, I doubt it very much.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Tell that to Arthur C. Clarke.
His 'satellites' were part of a story, as was radar.
"There are some things that we should probably not touch - and this is one of them."
Sez who? I don't see that written in my manual of life. Come to think of it, I didn't get a manual when I got here...
Centuries long humans have interfered with nature in selecting for organisms that serve us better than those provided by nature. Example: cows. Are they useful to us? Yes. Are they a risk to us ? Will they take over the world ? No. I don't think they would survive a single month without us feeding them ?
So, yes, many interesting things can be created, like bacteria that catalyse some useful reaction (such as converting sunlight into H2?). Will they be dangerous ? A bacteria that has no single gene to defend itself and only feeds on a very specific compound which we supply, is evolutionary seriously retarded in our cruel nature; similar to -- but much more extreme than -- the cow that has lost many of its instincts necessary to survive. Coincidently, the "robustness" features built-in even simple life are the most difficult to understand while the "useful" features are the simplest ones. Thus, expect these things to become real -- real soon and a very good thing too !
ofcourse people make more mistakes than the divine. people exist.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
If you answer the second... does it mean that people who are no longer useful to other, should not live?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Actually, thanks to the rigors of scientific logic, your view has been proven false. There must exist true statements which cannot be proven.
If the soul can't be measured by science, its existence is unknowable. For practical purposes you can act as if it doesn't exist, but we can't prove it false.It may seem a simple matter of genetic engineering to I may be getting old, but when did even basic genetic engineering become "simple"?
but of course they are human.
Human beings can't divide into parts and form two ro more new human beings, while embryos can.
Thus (from your biology book) the earliest one could call an bundle of human cells a 'being' is ~14 days, when specialized tissues begin to form and the zygote can no longer be divided into totipotent cells.
If this is hard for you to understand, please re-visit your (college level) biology text books.
He might be talking about things like GM pollen escaping into other crops. Aside from political/legal stupidities of farmers getting sued, there is a serious danger in contamination of wild species. If we end up with a GM monoculture of food a century from now, that puts us one virus away from global famine.
Any science fiction matter transporter really works by scanning the original, making a copy at the destination, and destroying the original. Usually they squeamishly avoid the potential paradoxen by making the scanning process itself destructive.
But any number of Star Trek 'transporter accident' episodes devolve from the separation of these steps. Including the fact that *there is a pattern buffer* and only the readily-available matter supply prevents you from marching an army of yourself out of the transporter.
In "The Saga of Cuckoo" (author's name forgotten) their transporter clearly works by copying, and they touch on what happens when copies meet, including copies taken at different times and copies of friends you hadn't met, yet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
download a mind from one brain into another
If I needed a brain transplant, I would definately want yours. I prefer my brains "UNUSED"!!!
mu ha ha ha... um... sorry... *wink*
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I think there must be a joke about how there's no Life in the lab so they had to come up with a synthetic one....
Now who believes rocks are alive? Aha, contradict the original statement.
-I am an elective eunuch.
given your link to google I found out that you only told half of the story.
:)
look here for the rest.
you also proved the first paragraph of this page
thank you.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
So does it have this rhythmic independent activity during general anesthesia too? One thing I did hear about the thalamus is that it acts as a bridge between cortical areas as well--something of a "traffic cop" between different areas of the cortex.
-I am an elective eunuch.
No, it's not quite at that stage of development today, but lisp is the only language I can see that has the potential to be in the near future. And when it arrives, it will of course be called something other than lisp, like DynamicJava or AspectJava, or some other marketing BS, but essentially they will have reinvented lisp, and built all the necessary libraries (LEGO bricks) from the ground up in their reinvented lisp. You need a lisp architecture for the system to scale up to the levels where extraordinary and large systems can be built with little effort.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <biolib.h>
#include <bio/protein.h>
#include <bio/dnalib.h>
#include <bio/rnalib.h>
/* i once heard someone say that
** we only use 10% of our brains
** because the rest is programming
** comments.
**
** he may have been on to something.*/
char *mySig;
from two haploid cells.
Whether that cell forms a new organism, several new organisms, or a spot on your panties, depends on what happens next.
Defining a cell by what it could become if certain events occur is a semantic (not scientific) excersise in absurdity especially as science progresses, a human cell that could become a human being is any human cell, and you have to come up with a whole new term for human being (post-totipotent person?).
Lets just start calling today 'tomorrow' while we're at it.
Your question is good. I do not know how anesthesia affects thalamic activity. Maybe someone else can enlighten us. I am sure the answer depends somewhat on the anesthesia. Some anesthetics have rather focused effects compared to others that provide more general suppression of neural activity. Some very quick research seems to indicate that some anesthetics do promote patterns similar to sleep in the thalamus and that others just generally suppress thalamic activity.
Am I just trippin' or is this a word for word repost of an article from about 2 months ago?
is a human being.
When you take your first science course, you will learn that scientific definitions are meant to be as specific as possible.
Vaugely describing a human being as anything ranging from a living diploid cell that can divide into several potential organisms or fuse with another into one, to an individual organism with a complex interdependent organ system, along with explanations of why some diploid cells formed by gametic fusion are not "human beings" while others are (depending on how long ago the fusion took place), is a definition based on a religious or philosophical need, not a scientfic one.
It only sounds simple and straightforward to people who don't know the details of reproduction in specific and cellular biology in general.
Of course, the truth is, you do get it, you're just engaging in sophistry to deny the fact that what you attack is the harvesting of human cells for the benefit of human beings.
Science Fiction speculates about areas where current human knowledge is lacking, but does not violate the known laws of physics, etc.
With Fantasy, all bets are off.
For example, using a warp drive to travel at super-luminal speeds is Science Fiction; using a chemical rocket to do it is Fantasy.
Most stories with magic in them are Fantasy, although I've read/seen a few that try to explain magic using technology, such as Babylon-5's technomages.
(Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but most magic in fiction these days is distinguishable from any sufficiently advanced technology because it violates known laws of physics (particulary the second law of thermodynamics).)
Sometimes things that claim to be Science Fiction start out as Science Fiction, but turn into Fantasy later (e.g., Stargate-SG1).
Other things were never Science Fiction to begin with (e.g., Space 1999).
But true Science Fiction tries to remain consistant with the current state of human knowledge, and definitely does not "just make anything you like up".
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana