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The Los Alamos Bug
Kannappan writes "'You somehow have to forget everything you know about life', says Steen Rasmussen, a colleague of Norman Packard. Packard and his team are working on creating life artificially, nicknamed The Los Alamos bug (pdf). It will be created out of a molecule called Peptide Nucleic Acid(PNA), with a blend of three different factors crucial to life, viz. containment, heredity and metabolism. The researchers believe that the synthetic lives so created will have an enormous practical value in producing clean fuels, healing injured bodies and acting as tiny diagnosticians roaming our bodies."
PNA is catalytically active-- you know enzymes. DNA is not. RNA may be(ribozyme), but is rather quickly degraded in the environment, and rather a bitch to work with.
Thanks for the insight. But that can be done by genetically engineering existing bugs. Why waste effort and create them from scratch. Moreover their evolutionary path would be unknown. And this will be a serious problem if such artificial lifeforms are used for medical purposes (mutations etc.)
Normal nucleic acids are composed of sugar, base and phosphate. PNA as described in the article replaces the sugar and phosphate with a peptide (I assume with the R group replaced with the A, T, G or C). The replacement of the sugar-phosphate backbone with a peptide makes the nucleic acid soluble in fat, rather than soluble in water -- the ultimate goal of using PNA rather than DNA or RNA.
And no, I do not believe there are other life forms based on PNA.
peptide nucleic acid apparently. See also this page. Hopefully this research will at least develop new techniques for handling and monitoring chemical systems. As for the religious implications, *yawn*.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Singularity Institute for AI
bite my glorious golden ass.
I suggest you learn English.
Create has a significantly broader definition than you claim.
Try doing a google search for "created" and be amazed at the "not from nothing" usage, for example http://www.udm4.com/demos/other-dynamic.php and it's created menus.
No they didn't. Crick and Watson got shown one of the pictures of DNA X-ray diffraction pattern Franklin had made (the best one) by one of her co-worker, Maurice Wilkins. Together with the work they had done on their own, C&W were able to deduce the structure. Without that picture it would have taken them longer, and potentially someone else would have found the structure before them, for example Linus Pauling in the USA, who was well on his way.
Now all three of Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine that year, when Wilkins honestly had done little more in this area than show Watson & Crick the crucial photo by Franklin. This goes to show that this particular picture was pretty damn important.
Franklin didn't get the Nobel because she was unfortunately dead by then, due to ovarian cancer she probably contracted as a result of continuous exposure to X-Rays during her work. Her name was later besmirched
Fighting off a virus is a function of the immune system. (The "disease fighting" subroutine contained in DNA and executed by those little protein producing computing engines contained in every cells of the human body.) These biological computing engines are remarkably like modern computers as they have a big/slow NVRAM with a stored program (DNA), caches, parallel execution units, etc. And actually, I have stated this backward: modern computers are remarkably similar to these biological computing engines. (The idea being we build in our own image. Presumably at the subconscious level as we didn't have a particularly good idea what was going on inside the cells of our body when computer architecture was taking shape.)
Same deal with reproduction. Again you have this stored program in DNA. Only instead of running the "disease fighting" subroutine, the "new life building" subroutines are being executed. The part about "no input from mom" (brain) is about right. But this "new life building" factory is certainly consuming an abnormal amount of resources and moms brain is thinking "damn I'm hungy...must eat more junk food."
Motor control (stuffing food into your mouth while seated balanced at the table), visual processing (looking at girls...or guys in the case of pregnant mom) and aural processing (listening to music or mindless blabber), regulating your heart rate, abstract thinking, etc. that stuff is your brain at work. And unlike the DNA subroutine executing cells of the body, the brain doesn't seem to operate much like our modern computer architecture. However, I think it is reasonable to assume that as we were successful in building stored program computers which are at least conceptually similar in operation to human cells that we will one day (perhaps not too far from now) "untangle" the wiring inside the human brain and in so doing create "intelligent" machines.
I don't think anyone is underestimating how powerful the brain is. You have probably seen this factoid thrown out here on Slashdot before but it is estimated that the human brain has equivalent computational capacity of something like 1 PFLOP seconf. (That's one quadrillion floating point operations performed per second.) We don't have computers like that today (we have a few big parallel machines in the TFLOP range) but apparently now that the Earth Simulator has been knocked from the top spot the Japanese are talking about building a computer in the PFLOP range. So with any luck, by the time we figure out how to untangle the wiring inside the human brain we will have a really fast stored program computer available to run AI simulations to check that we got it right.
A virus is not alive.
Life definition: "Is able to replicate itself".
A virus is unable to do this; the replication is done by the infected cell.