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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."
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".
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
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.
Despite being a (short-age) creationist, I agree with this parent.
Whether over 4 billion or 6 thousand years, the earth (at least until recently) had settled into a (relatively) stable balance between prey and predator and consumer and producer. There is enough potential damage in just modifying the life we have (through GM etc) without trying to make a complete rogue lifeform.
Are there (too) many parentheses in this post?
I think what tree huggers fail to realize is that the Earth will do fine, for billions of more years. We, The People may not survive, but the Earth will be here for eons to come.
People have been modifying bacteria, viruses and other simple organisms to make them do things they usually don't. However, even if these things are published, it is not easy to share this information. A parts-library will help because is like open source and is hopefully machine-searchable. That itself is worth the trouble. What was once the technique and expertise of one lab can now be leveraged somewhere else.
IMHO, a parts library should not just have the names of the components but also how they can be interfaced to work properly (Their API). This is more useful and less obvious when constructing devices from biological materials. Biological components are very stringent in the environmental conditions they need to work properly.
They are not claiming or aiming to create "life" but rather new functionality in existing life. Doesn't vaccination do that to us? As for answering fundamental questions, I'm not sure we get any closer. Describing the processes of biology doesn't do much to explain why it is so.
Humans have such a good sense of humor!
Death is going to happen regardless. Focus on the things you most want to do.
This would help explain near-death experiences where the person who is clinically brain-dead can have experiences during this dead period.
What?
A person who is brain-dead doesn't come back. You meant a person who is temporarily diagnosed as dead, based on lack of pulse.
Near-death experiences can be summoned, almost by will. Slip someone a dose of 3mg/kg ketamine HCl without their knowledge. When their trips ends, tell them you thought they had died, they'll categorize their trip as a "near-death" experience. Their descriptions will also be pretty similar to those who were technically near death.
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.
Nah. George Bush was working on A more short term plan. Allowing more immigrant workers.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
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.
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.
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.
Embracing software component -oriented programming are we?
Well... there are numerous problems involved in making software components Just Work(TM)... You'd have to get the programming infrastructure there first. C++ is not up to the challenge, from what I've experienced -- having to add on extra syntactical constructs (Qt MOC (well, not really, but you get the point)) or heaps of macros (Mozilla XPCOM). Objective-C seems better, but I think it is probably best suited for Smalltalk, where the concept probably originated from.
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
OK, how is a joke post that doesn't hurt anyone, doesn't say bad things about anyone or any corporation or really anything get modded as a troll?
Idiots should NOT have mod points.
Personally I think the way we should determine whether someone should live or die is that everyone should live :P If you have to choose who lives or dies for some reason, the people who bring the most joy to the most people after subtracting the pain they bring as well should determine who goes, and who stays. The problem is that this is impossible to quantify, so we return to my original point.
Now you might say that we should kill people who have done things which are too terribly bad, but that is frankly hypocritical if you count killing people amongst the bad things, unless you believe that locking someone up forever is worse than killing them - However, I think you should ask their opinion on that before you snuff 'em. Let them change their mind later if they so choose, unless of course they choose death in the first place...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Although I can see dangers in introducing designed lifeforms into the environment. I would still bet that life that has evolved naturally over the past 4 billion years would make short work of anything we could produce.
Basically we live in biosphere that is constantly producing and re-designing living organisms to be as successful as possible, although in a rather haphazard and random way.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.