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

Blade runner's replicants are part of a *story*!

[Moderation abuser]

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.

Saviour for people in need in of transplants?

[BuddieFox]

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".

Re:Saviour for people in need in of transplants?

[binaryDigit]

"BioBricks" might spell the end of people dying due to lack of suitable organ donors

Or the end of people dying altogether? "Time to go freshen up the liver, mine is getting a bit worn out". Sounds like this might be a competing technology for cloning?

Re:Saviour for people in need in of transplants?

[cammoblammo]

What sort of idiots do you think we are? We're /.ers. We've memorised every little bit of our high school biology books on the chapters to do with sexual reproduction.

Pity that very few of us will be able to take our learning into the field.

Re:Saviour for people in need in of transplants?

[Total_Wimp]

I'm not worried about replicants. I'm worried accidentally creating critters that interact with humans like viruses or bacteria but we don't have a very good idea of how to deal with them.

I'm also worried about the same thing, but made on purpose.

Once life becomes as easy to engineer as a computer program then you have to deal with the same thing as computer systems have to deal with now that any nutjob can use the tools. I don't really think we're ready for the consequences of not having McCaffee AV installed in our bone marrow.

Should it be stopped. Nah. But these folks better be pretty damn careful with what they're doing. As with GM foods though, I doubt they will.

TW

Re:Saviour for people in need in of transplants?

[Anonymous Coward]

Death is one of the most important parts of life.

Death is an important part of life in the same way that 0 is an important part of 1.

It doesn't matter too terribly much when or how it occurs, as long as the person has enjoyed their life.

This is called "hedonism" and is, like all other non-reproductive theories of what is or is not important in life, unsupported by evidence.

If an organ fails, maybe the question "Does this person still need to live" should be asked.

Maybe the question should be "Does this organ need replacement?" This is not 600 B.C.

After all, we don't all need to be alive forever.

None of us need to be alive at all.

I'd hate to see the day when people live to be 180 years old.

Knock yourself out, then.

If people stop dying (or death slows down, as it surely will continue to do), the world's population problem will only grow.

Earth doesn't have a population problem, humans have a resource distribution problem.

I think people really need to 1) stop having children

I think scientists need to invent a time machine and give this advice to your parents.

2) try to accept death a little more.

You first.

Trypo!

[Himring]

"Scientific American is carrying a story about sythetic life...."

Trypo!

How Long Before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lego Starts Suing?

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"?"

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.

Re:Be more specific

[Gyan]

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.

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.

Re:Guess it depends on the definition of "life"

[Michael Dorfman]

> Any life arising from the hand of man is de facto synthetic

Well, that would apply to most donated sperm, then.

MIT Database

[cTbone]

MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts:

http://parts.mit.edu/

As mentioned in the article.

Blah blah, more words, more words, blah blah blah

[JessLeah]

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...

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?

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

End of death

[truthsearch]

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.

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.

Re:End of death

[Esion Modnar]

or the brain needs to become downloadable.

And this is where technology ends and philosophy begins.

Consider the differences between electronic transmittal and physical movement. In electronic transmission (emails, file transfers, etc.) a copy is made at the destination, and the original is (optionally) destroyed. Physical movement involves an object moving in four dimensions, without copying or destruction being involved.

If I move from one side of the room to another, I am still me. If somebody transmits an exact copy of me from one side of the room to the other, and then destroys the original, I am not still me... a copy.

What's even more interesting, is that each living organism is constantly changing, bringing in and excreting matter on a constant basis. Over time, the matter composing your being is not the same matter which composed your being 20 years ago. And yet you are still "you." And yet you aren't. Do you like the same music? Do you act the same? Would your 20-year younger self even like you? The you of today shares an history with your younger self and thus originates your sense of self-continuity.

So, to conclude, downloading your brain to some electronic or otherwise existence is not going to make a bit of difference to your biological self. When your body dies, YOU are dead. Doesn't matter how many exact copies somebody made of you.

Re:End of death

[Sgt York]

The corpus callosum is not the only conection between the two sides of the brain. There are also connections in the fornix, peduncles, and other portions of the basal ganglia. The callosum connects the cortical regions to each other, but not the basal ganglia*.

Moreover, the parts of the brain that control life support (heart=beating, vasculature=functioning, etc) are not so easily divided into hemishperes as is are the lobes. These are also the regions in which a good deal of the left-right crossover in the central nervous system takes place. I doubt you would be able to remove one side without seriously disrupting the other.

*For the anatomists : yes, I know that the ganglia are also hemispheric. They do, however, have communicating white matter going between the hemispheres.

Before you get carried away

[espressojim]

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.

By your definition, any diploid human cell

[MichaelPenne]

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.