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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."
Run that past me once again in English?
OK. "They're fscking cheating"
They're using PNA because it does fancy stuff "on its own", just because the out of it is soluble in oil, but the inside of it is repelled by oil and prefers water. So it goes up and down according to whether it's "single-stranded" or "two-stranded" (i.e. whether the inside is expopsed or not). You don't need the complex machinery of metabolic reactions which is necessary for "real" life to cut, assemble and move stuff around.
The whole thing is a fraud, at least if TFA from the New Scientist is an accurate description. Never mind that the genome is essentially random bits of PNA that don't code for any chemical machinery. TFA says that it does influence "metabolism" directly, through electromechanical influence. Wow, that leaves a lot of degrees of freedom for evolution to play with, doesn't it ? (Hint: no, it doesn't). I could mention the utter lack of self-regulation (that thing just grows and divides when it's too big, period), removing the essential computational component of life (wonder what Packard's friend Stuart Kauffman would say about that).
The worst part is the thermodynamics. Apparently all the reactions that occur within the bug are "downwards", degrading reactions. The bug doesn't relly "build" anything. The miracle of life lies precisely in its self-constructing aspect: life is able to couple downwards, energy-releasing reactions and upwards, constructive reactions so that the former "feed" the latter. Thus living systems really construct themselves. That "bug" just uses hand-tailored, pre-activated, energy-packed components which are fed to it by the experimenter and degrades them according to a carefully hand-defined pathway. Evolution of the inner processes is utterly impossible because, essentially, there is no real "inner process". It's just like fire - a downwards, energy releasing reaction without any self-regulation. .
If this thing is alive, then so were Sydney Fox' "protocells" from 40 years ago !
That thing is about as relevant to understanding life as Deep Blue was to understanding intelligence - i.e. it gives a good example of what life is not.
Thomas.