Scientists Creating Life From Scratch

Rubberbando writes "MSNBC is running a story about bioengineering organisms to do specific tasks such as produce hydrogen or ethenol. It also goes into the risks and ethical issues of playing with this sort of science. Some of the scientists involved are saying it's more of an art instead of a science due to its 'biohacking' style of experimentation."

Comments

Misleading Title

[AKAImBatman]

FYI, the title is incorrect. There is no "from scratch" component to the life. What they're doing is building custom DNA, then injecting it into a living cell.

stuff

[lovebyte]

Making stuff is the big deal. Most chemicals are made from petrol nowadays and the chemical companies are searching for a way out of this dependency on petrol. One way is plants (as raw material) + bacteria(for their enzymatic reactions). Quite a few microbiology labs are now working in discovery, selection and bio-engeneering of bacteria for this very purpose. Personally, I think the discovery part is very important since we know close to nothing about the biodiversity of bacteria. A number I heard recently is that 70% of the biomass of this planet is made of bacteria, and most of them live in the ground and are very difficult to isolate and study and thus mostly unknown. Look up metagenomic in google for more info.

Re:Been done?

[pin_gween]

Not quite -- Miller-Urey succeeded in making organic molecules

While necessary for life, molecules are not living organisms.

Oro's experiment created the base adenine, which is one of 4 nitrogen bases in DNA. Again, not life.