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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".
"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
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"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 ?
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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.
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!
Pretty soon we can have a real living lego maniac (tm)
Sweet.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.