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Creating Artificial Proteins
Spy der Mann writes "By examining how proteins have evolved, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have been able to design genes to create artificial proteins.
The researchers have discovered a set of simple "rules" that nature appears to use to design proteins. By feeding these rules into a computer program, they were able to obtain a sequence of artificial genes. These genes were then inserted into laboratory bacteria, producing the artificial proteins as expected."
Isn't one of the reasons that creationist use when they attack evolution (actually abiogenesis) is that it would take such a long time to generate functioning proteins through random chance that it would be statistically impossible? If there are simple "rules" to create proteins, maybe that's how nature was able to come up with life so quickly.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
The researchers believe they may have found a set of statistical rules for determining the tertiary ('overall') structure of proteins from the sequence.
(Although the summary reads otherwise, creating a 'new' protein with an arbitrary amino acid sequence isn't new at all though. )
If this pans out, it is of course significant towards the goal of engineering 'new' proteins one day. But there is still a lot to be covered. Even if the relationship between sequence and structure were simple and known (and it isn't, yet), you still have the issue of relating structure to function.
Which isn't known. And of course, even knowing the structure and function of a single protein doesn't mean you know what it's going to do in a complicated environment such as a cell, where there are thousands of things to interact with.
It's a step forward, nonetheless. But if someone thinks this means we're going to be tricking-out living organisms with new custom-engineered proteins anytime soon, you'll be disappointed.
Most proteins eventually degrade, if they are not immediately destroyed by the immune system (ie, antigenic). Furthermore, for proteins that don't degrade quickly, how would you detect these proteins? Other than putting radioactive isotopes (try getting on an airplane with that in today's environment!), I don't see how you would detect them other than strapping someone down and getting some blood. I suppose you could always try a gene therapy technique to continually express protein, but gene therapy is still highly experimental and presents its own problems. This sounds way more complicated than just implanting inorganic RFID chips/beacons/whatevers under the skin or in a (cough!) body cavity.
In two papers appearing in the Sept. 22 issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Rama Ranganathan, associate professor of pharmacology, and his colleagues detail a new method for creating artificial proteins...
That's the sum total of useful information in the article. Go read the full paper in Nature if you want to know more. Scientific reporting at its finest. Now and then I read an article where a "journalist" actually understands what has been written and has something profound to say about it that the scientists themselves didn't even think of (and actually agree with). Unfortunately it's increasingly rare these days. Even rags like Scientific American seem to do more puff pieces and press releases than well researched articles these days.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Every time someone uses experiments like this to "disprove creationism" (as if this is something that can be proven or disproven in the first place), they ignore the common feature to all of these tests:
The scientist.
All this "proves" is that it is possible for an intelligent being to combine elements to create something more complicated.
You're saying this experiment shows all of this around us "proves" it could all happen on its own?
The creationist/ID policy is to avoid facing unknowns by passing the buck onto a designer. In the current example, just because something appears elegant and simple to some person, it does'nt mean that it could not have naturally occured.
I don't think that's quite correct. My understanding is that ID examines a result using statistical or logical tools to see if it could have occurred by chance. It's not a subjective test. A statistical abberration indicates some outside influence. A collection of pre-existing conditions that all must be met at once (and not a step at a time) indicates some outside influence.
Glib oversimplified statements about ID will only come back to haunt you someday when we realize those ID guys were onto something - even if they don't quite have it all figured out yet.
I dunno, GP might be right. The fact that a Scientist *can* drop a rock and have it hit the ground, probably means that rocks *cannot* fall off mountains without the aid of some Intelligent Dropper.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
I'm not sure how simple the rules are has anything to do with the chance that a particular thing arises. A simple rule could be "A standard earth protein must have 37 XYZ chains" - short, sweet, and simple. But how does now knowing that there must be 37 XYZ chains to get a standard protein now mean that before it was known it was simple? Especially when there are more potential combinations than there are atoms in the universe.
I stick by my earlier assertion that simple rules are only simple after they are discovered, not before when the future is unknown, and there are an incredible number of possibilities.
Scientists don't use evolution because they're out to win some sort of ideological battle. They use it because it works. They want to understand how an amino acid becomes a protein. Evolution helps explain the process. Creationism and ID don't explain the process at all. They just say two things: (a) god made them; and (b) stop asking questions.
If evolution didn't help further science, it would be abandoned in favor of whatever did. But it works, which is why scientists rely on it and why teachers need to explain it in science classrooms.