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."

Comments

Hope this will bring us closer to

[GillBates0]

answering the fundamental question:

"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"?"

Re:Hope this will bring us closer to

[StrawberryFrog]

"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"?"

I'd say that the last 100 years of science makes it abundantly clear that what you can measure is all there is - there's no mystery to it that cannot be apprehended, no soul-in-scare-quotes to bring about life-in-scare-quotes. Nothing mysterious, but plenty that we don't understand. Yet.

no dice

[jacquesm]

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 ?

Re:no dice

[WormholeFiend]

you dont need to have escapist lab-made "lifeforms" to be scared like this...

remember the space station MIR and its colony of cosmic-ray mutated microbes that was eating it from inside out (including the quartz windows)?

there's a strong possibility that some of those nasties survived re-entry and are now thriving somewhere in the Pacific.

i submit that the toothpaste has been squeezed out of the tube already, so we might as well kick evolution in the butt and introduce as much new life as possible and sit and watch what happens.

survival of the fittest at 11!

Be more specific

[Thinkit4]

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.

If only we had this for software engineering...

[firelord2377]

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? :)

Guess it depends on the definition of "life"

[w.p.richardson]

Are viruses alive? Researchers can customize viruses (by removing protiens, substituting amino acids, etc.) and have done so for years in labs. If a virus is alive (possibly debatable), then there is already a precdent for synthetic life.

Additionally, I would consider clones to be synthetic life. Any life arising from the hand of man is de facto synthetic, IMHO.

I love these bio-tech stories

[l0ungeb0y]

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?

Landmark beginning, or possibly...

[cagle_.25]

...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.

Micromachines

[gmuslera]

They more could be seen as micromachines (with a builtin replication engine) than "life". The replication part is nice, but the potential of what it could do is even nicer.

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

Very Interesting

[Pan T. Hose]

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:

Tierra is a computer simulation developed by ecologist Thomas S. Ray in the early 1990s in which computer programs compete for central processor unit (CPU) time and access to main memory. The computer programs in Tierra are evolvable and can mutate, self-replicate and recombine. Tierra is a frequently cited example of an artificial life model; in the metaphor of the Tierra, the evolvable computer programs can be considered as digital organisms which compete for energy (CPU time) and resources (main memory).

The basic Tierra model has been used to experimentally explore in silico, the basic processes of evolutionary and ecological dynamics. Processes such as the dynamics of punctuated equilibrium, host-parasite co-evolution and density dependent natural selection are amenable to investigation within the Tierra framework. A notable difference to more conventional models of evolutionary computation, such as genetic algorithms is that there is no explicit, or exogenous fitness function built into the model. Often in such models there is the notion of a function being "optimized"; in the case of Tierra, the fitness function is endogenous: there is simply survival and death. According to Ray and others this may allow for more "open-ended" evolution, in which the dynamics of the feedback between evolutionary and ecological processes can itself change over time (see evolvability).

While the dynamics of Tierra are highly suggestive, the significance of the dynamics for real ecological and evolutionary behavior are still a subject of debate within the scientific community. Tierra is an abstract model, but any quantitative model is still subject to the same validation and verification techniques applied to more traditional mathematical models, and as such, has no special status. More detailed models in which more realistic dynamics of biological systems and organisms are incorporated is now an active research field (see systems biology).

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.

Re:End of death

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to take a look at "The Binding of Death" by Culain or the more famous Theodore Sturgeon story on the consequences of ending death. Not a pretty sight ... unless we were able to control our reproductive proclivities, of which the odds range from slim to ... well, Nun.

I also expect that we'll need a brain-wash every 500 or so years ... and how that differs from that drink from Lethe escapes me ...

Re:End of death

[simonjester2424]

If you are still alive, and an exact copy of you is made (mind and body). Is that you or a copy of you? Now I distroy the original. Have I killed you or not? Your copy still lives, but you're dead, neh?

So, how can you say that downloading someone makes them immortal? Perhaps their copy is semi-immortal.

There are still plenty of ways for the copy to die, even if the process is perfect: insanity, lose of power, deletion (murder or accident), hardware/software failure, bitrot.....

Re:End of death

[lawpoop]

Here's a quick hack. Note that people can function more or less normally with their corpus callosum severed -- that's the link between the left and right brain. So, cut the callosum, remove one-half of the brain, and replace with a freshly grown half. Sew patient back up, give them a couple months for re-adjustment. Repeat with next half. Voila! Brand-new brain, installed in two parts.