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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."
I wonder what latin name this will be christened with? . . .
A B A C A B B
...goo!
If I could, I'd destroy you all.
Are there any other lifeforms based on PNA? Why aren't they using DNA?
Do I just need to RTFA?
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
cmon, you know you want to bow down before them....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Intelligent design! So there! Go...go Bush?
Does Man's arrogance know no bounds? Have Hiroshima, Genetically Modified corn, Global Warming and the Sasser Worm taught us NOTHING?
I think we need to do a bit more praying, and a bit less messing around in the laborotory trying to 'play God'.
Surely there should be a law against creating artificial life forms when we have NO WAY of knowing what effect they will have when they break out of the lab?
With our increasing knowledge of the mechanics of life, it's a matter of time until somebody succeeds in creating life from scratch. I don't think it's very controversial these days to say that if we don't already have the power to create life in vitro, we someday will.
For my money, a much more interesting question is, can we create *intelligence* from scratch? Humor aside, I think creating something with recognizable intelligence (not just programming) will be much more difficult -- and have much more profound implications -- than "merely" creating life.
Such experiments should help narrow down the various factors in the Drake Equation. Life, I suspect, is fairly commonplace. I have no idea if intelligence is.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Well. that's one way to get a life.
C|N>K
MAWKES ME SICK JUST
...and acting as tiny diagnosticians roaming our bodies.
My macrophages are salivating already...
... welcome our new grey-goo overlords. :)
i can picture that House bloke getting around in my colon, and people asking him whay he's so cranky all the time. "I'm a tiny diaogno... diagos...um, doctor, and I work in an ass".
serenity now!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My thoughts are that wont it be better to focus efforts for building artificial life on increasing computational intelligence. Seriously... what good the creation of a bug do to humanity? If the same brainpower is chanellised into creating intelligent machines, the benefit humanity gains, is immense.
Did they get the idea from watching Voyager and 7 of 9's nanoprobes?
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
not created.
subtle but very important difference.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Great name - sounds like something out of a movie based on a video game. 'Outraged at the price of new labcoats Dr. Such and Such loosed the Los Alamos Bug to destroy the world.'
Hmm and Doom came out this weekend - coincidence?
On behalf of all Slashdot serfs, on bended knee I extend a very warm welcome our new Los Alamos Bug overlords!
maybe not, but its nothing a vacume cleaner cant fix.
This will confuse creationists - on one hand, they have to forbid it as meddling with God's work, but on the other hand, it's the best chance they have of getting 'intelligent design' considered a science.
All available data suggest that regardless of any of this, the sun will still come up tomorrow.
Freakin scientists. Go cure cancer or something, will ya?!
I suppose once everyone's infected with this bug, nobody will be able to help but to "REMEMBER THE los ALAMOs Bug."
That's all I have. Sorry, it's late.
We've known for a long time that extremophiles (organisms capable of surviving in extreme conditions, often incapable of surviving under human-friendly conditions) exist, and speculated that such life is the kind we'd find on other planets. However, this type of thinking (not necessarily PNA life; I think the slower diffusion inherent to fatty acids relative to water will mean that this new life-form is only useful as a test) allows us to produce extremophiles more exotic than what we see on Earth. All known life is DNA-based, and cannot survive in situations where DNA is for some reason broken up (hostile chemicals, high-evergy environments, low-energy environments, and the like). Imagine, however, life based on elements solid at room temperature and liquid at higher temperatures living on Mercury, where water can't be liquid; or life based on liquid oxygen or hydrogen, living far from any star, surviving distances between star systems without life support. This also challenges (traditional) creationism. If we can make life to exist anywhere, that means that the argument about Earth's specialization as a life-bearing planet is meaningless. This doesn't mean that God doesn't exist or that he is dead, merely that he doesn't have to exist. However, it gets rid of the creationism Trump Card so often played by precocious high-school students in Biology class. Conversely, if we find that we can't make life at all, or can only create PNA life, and can't manage artificial DNA life, it could turn evolutionary theory on its head. If we can't make life in a lab, how could we expect it to happen outside a lab? This would get rid of the Trump Card so often played by precocious devout atheists in High School biology classes.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Some people think that before DNA evolved, everything was done with RNA. Both hereditary information and the physical catalysts. Like proteins, RNA molecules can fold up into odd shapes and perform catalytic reactions. The only difference is that Protein based system work faster. The Ribosome, which converts RNA into Proteins is actually made from RNA, rather then proteins, and is almost exactly the same in all life.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Maybe it was a dream but I remember taking the tram ride for a few minutes into a secret lab where an experiment had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Is this the same Los Alamos that lost 2 computer tapes containing nuclear secrets?
Table-ized A.I.
This shouldn't be very surprising. With all the current infrastructure, it just takes a few enterprising minds to get that crucial idea, and "create life". Note that the article pinpoints the distinction between life and non-life as the ability to undergo evolution. The creation of "intelligence" from scratch will possibly take a lot more work.
Some people have already made comments about intelligent design here, but I thought I should add something. This week I was approached by a creationist/intelligent-design group on campus and they talked a bit about their ideas. One of the main things they mentioned is how unlikely it was that cells could have evolved out of random chemicals. To them, cells are far too complex to have been anything but a conscious creation, and they dispute that such a thing could have evolved out of less complex parts.
While I am not a creationist, I did see the point of their argument - how simple amino acids and organic chemicals were first formed into cells, I have no idea.
Does this experiment do anything to address that question? Do biologists have any ideas on how it happened?
Of course, if scientists ever do manage to recreate cells in a lab, both sides will claim it is a victory for their side's argument...
Quote: "Rasmussen and his colleagues had to begin with the most basic of questions: what is the least something must do to qualify as being alive?" - A question to die for!
Sounds like a name for a video game: "The Los Alamos Bug".
Here's the storyline: A new artificially created bug escapes the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This bug evolves into a virus and kills almost all of the human population... etc...
Just to remind everyone, it's not playing God if you aren't creating life with pure will power alone...
I find the entire article to be smug. Nothing has been created yet. It's simple gloating and publicity by the "scientists" who have created nothing, but want attention.
What bugged me was that at the intro to the episode the narrator, a bad comic if I've ever seen one and an anchor dragging down a once good program, spoke of the work as the greatest work since creation. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was then flashed on the screen showing the 'Creator's' hand outstreached to the reaching hand of his creation, Adam. IMO it stank of lip service to the American fundamentalist neoconservatives.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
But do they taste good dipped in chocolate?
It is said that only God can make a tree ... but men can sprout a woodie. Is this new, artificial life like that?
;)
I for one welcome our new artificial overlords
The article sites these hypothetical applications:
1. Creation of Hydrogen
2. Biological Probes
3. Breakdown of toxics.
At the same time they describe a restricted form of life that has properties:
1. Very inefficient metabolism, even compared with ordinary photosynthesis
2. Very restricted environment for survival (variable temp. bath of PNA precursor and oil/lipid/water mix.)
3. Reliance on a few years of evolution in a tiny physical space (compared to, say, 100 million years in a primordial ocean.)
Of the 3 ideas, the only one that sounds remotely feasible is (3), with (1) a distant second. I would think it would be much easier to design enzymatic processes to fit into preexisting life for such applications, rather than start over from scratch, then design enzymes for a new (toy) environment.
Of course, the real issue is -- this is a way coool experiment. Note the concrete focus on the nobel prize, with wild handwaving as far as applications go. There may be applications. But I doubt they will be as direct or obvious as the 3 listed in the article.
From the article:
with a blend of three different factors crucial to life - sex, drugs and rock'n roll.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
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.
"I've done it! It's alive, ALIVE!"
"Now, bow down and worship me, you microscopic lump of lard or i'll flush you!"
Table-ized A.I.
"So now we've carefully put everything from the checklist in so that we know exactly what's in there and what's not. Next we put the lid o...ah...aaaaah CHHHOOOO!!"
"Oh shit"
Table-ized A.I.
You're on my turf now, science boy. Please stop playing me or there will be....trouble.
Yours sincerely
God
PS Yes I post on Slashdot, quite frequently actually
PPS I really don't like being called "Anonymous Coward". Of course with my omnipotence I could have changed it to anything I liked, but I could forsee a molten pile of slashodot servers if I messed with this flimsy database structure you call home, and something that resembles a burnt out Taco shell (commander variety) as a side effect.
PPPS Don't even think of modding this as "off topic". I know who you are and where you live, and I don't even work for the Government.
...maybe it wasn't such a smart idea to announce they were creating life artificially. Me, I'd wait until I had a foolproof process, then release the full details everywhere simultaneously -
- and anonymously.
Seriously, there's some whackos out there. I wouldn't want to answer the door to a fundamentalist-mob-o-gram.
The fact that it took about the planets lifetime to form the first cells (BILLIONS of years) smacks of evolution rather than creationism. or did god simply take billions of years to think that he might like life here?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Obviously you have never read "Dorsai". Where they discuss this very thing. For example, what would happen if a bunch of apes could design and build the ultimate ape. Would it have the intelligence of home sapiens? Probably not. Rather it would have more strength, greater size, more powerful jaws, better olfactory glands, etc. It would probably not have a better mental capacity to conceptualize and build tools like a man (or woman if you insist on PC).
Thus, could we really build real better people? Sure we could enhance those features that we believe are important today. But could we conceptualize and build a better human with skills and capabilities that we can't even imagine? Perhaps.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
They said: "Imagine putting rabbits down in Australia!" (when they arrived they reproduced, like rabbits, and became a small catastrophy)
Be carefull what you wish for.
Creating life without being married is not what reborn christians are supposed to do.
I hope it doesn't turn out like Lore.
I wonder if they will succeed in creating the Square Bug which will
be real nasty to certain people, and spend it's life dancing inside those
cardboard Tootsie Roll cans/banks.
Name : God
: Well I can still do the plague thingy at parties. Or do apocalypse stuff on a 3*8 basis.
How do you see your future : Plumbery seems good. Or electricity. Something you can't outsource and that damn Adam will need me for.
Age : Infinite
Adress : Cosmos
Contact : Just pray. Maybe I'll hear, who knows.
What were your prior job :
I did the "Let the light be" stuff but later Adam outsourced me for the light bulb, and replaced the imperative-tense with the switch.
Then I used to create life but lately the same Adam started to do its on its own and now I am out of job.
What are your competance
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...with mint frosting!
Spelling, grammar, punctuation? We need something that checks logic.
normally i'm always totally down for the biological research and stuffs, but something about this just doesn't feel right... i mean, we're creating a lifeform here... iunno. I'm not gonna stop 'em, and certainly not on moral grounds (ain't got none of those left)... but something about this screams "Sci-Fi Horror Movie" to me :/
This whole thing is really kinda unsettling.
What's interesting when you read the article, is how they are going to be determining their success. They specifically state that they will be "looking for signs of adaptation" to determine whether their creation is a lifeform or not. Early in the article they state that Darwinian evolution is the agreed upon basis for this decision. What if they're wrong? I'm not saying they are...but what if? Another point...they are claiming to be creating synthetic life, but they are using RNA to accomplish this...which is an already-established ingredient in life. So aren't they simply 'hacking' a lifeform?
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
So basically they are creating organic nanobots?
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
What happens WHEN these things evolve? That would be a all-life-on-earth-as-we-know-it-ending big problem. I guess they never heard that saying "Life has its ways."
>>Um, yeah. Water + Heat = H2 + O2.
Um, No?
Water + Heat != H2 + O2.
Water + Heat = Hot Water.
Water Heated to more then 100C = Steam.
However...
Water + ELECTRICITY = H2 + O.
Only with Hydrogen Peroxide + Electricity do you = H2 + O2
Actually, a fun one would be H2 + O + Heat, which we normally call rockets...
And actually (again), since oxygen is diatomic normally, you'd be working with 2H2 + O2.
Isn't chemistry *fun?!*
*ramps up for tutoring basic chemistry in the morn'*
There is something these people ( and other would-be Dr. Faust ) overlook. IT was clearly pointed out by John Searle that not only intelligence, but all life distinguishes itself from what is not alive by something called "intentionality". Even a virus has that. "Explained as if to a 4-year old", as Denzel Washington does it in "Philadelphia", this means that everything alive adds a purpose to any of its actions, from the virus up to the human being. As long as you havenot created something which provably *acts* in an intentional way, you only have a machine, and not life.
Now one might argue that these people, as a matter of fact, *do* have an intentionality to put into their new form of life: making money for them.
And that is just sad. Narrow-minded and sad.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Does "organic goo", left alone, tend toward order or disorder?
Ok , this particular one won't , it requires a very particular lab enviroment.
But they won't stop at this and the potential for using in the real world
is very high. Fine. But if it goes out of control? What then? Its not a
computer virus where at the last resort you reinstall the OS. You can't
reinstall the earths enviroment. Is creating artificial life like this
*really* a good idea, or is it just a way of scientists boosting their egos
and various corps making a fast buck?
I saw this in New Scientist a few weeks ago. There's a nice, long article about this in there.
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
Thinking of all the great discoveries of science, one cannot oversee that the majority of them had been used first as a weapon, and then for something like curing a desease, or feeding the poor.... I am just wondering weather these scientists have children. And if the do have, are they really willing to expose them to the potential dangers this "bug" will introduce....
Religion has nothing to do with this. it's chemistry and biology, so keep the Pope out of it. but as for grey goo, not gonna happen from this. the article states that the organism will be oil and fat based, so in a wild environment it will have a hard time propagating unless actively transmitted.
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
I wouldn't be surprised if one day the normal mode of 'retirement' is to take a few years off from work every decade or two, but never permanently retire.
I've always worried that my generation might face exactly that prospect... only in a more negative way than you portray it. Think "involuntarily take two to six months off every year or two, find new work just before you burn through all your savings from the last job, and have nothing to retire ON when you get old".
Freedom: "I won't!"
I, for one, welcome our new PNA overlords...
We've all seen sci-fi movies - this can only end in the bugs killing their makers and attempting to take over the world. Now we just need a hero to save us at the last minute!
Think the riots over GM food in Europe and Africa are wild? Wait until artificial germs and animal life come along. These are more mobile and mix with other living things.
Several viruses have already been constructed from scratch- polio and 1918 flu. Its not clear whether they have the same power as the original. These just have a couple dozen proteins and genes. Minimal life is thought to rquire about four hundred or so.
If they can create a "bug" that replaces soil nutrients after farming, a bug that removes NOx from exhaust, and a bug that improves peoples driving skills then they will have accomplished world peace. Well, I would be more peaceful on the way to work.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Math-wise, computers are far more intelligent than the average individual at computation.
What's really important isn't the speed, it's the architecture. The human brain is much more powerful than any computer, when it comes to "real life" usage, not only calculation with numbers.
Think of what your brain does all the same time and realtime:
- speech recognition and "synthesizing"
- sound recognition with beat and melody detection
- video processing with extremely powerful object recognition
- control of all your tenthousends of muscles with extremely good coordination
- maintaining all your "internal services" you don't normally notice at all
- learning capability
- huge memory
- lateral thinking
- lots more...
Now imagine to run just a few things of what your brain does on a computer, no matter how fast it is...
It's the brains architecture with it's neurons which makes the stupiest person superior to the fastest computer with it's transistors.
The brain is just so much more flexible..
So Stephen King saw into the future..... I'm going to start heading to Boulder, Co before all the cars filled with dead clog the interstates. Walking sucks!
This reminds me of the line from a good book "Scientists were so caught up with what they could build, that they never stopped to think if they should" Maybe I don't WANT artificial life forms roaming around inside my body :) Thing is, once you release (or something escapes) like this that can live at the single cell level what's to stop it from spreading? At least with nanobots they can be made to not reproduce.
That question has been asked so many times, it has now lost its meaning. What if? What if? What if? What if? What if?
Here's a "what if" for you: What if we never tried anything new? It just existing without change a meaningful existance? I say no.
This is all fantastic to see. I would hope that our new PNA Overlords would ignore the humor about the ingredients required to catch flies.
This should do wonders for the Catholic church in determining what a soul is, isn't and what's within the boundries of life.
AF-Design, web development.
man was not made to play god
isnt this exactly what all those sci fi AI movies are warning against, that we one day gonna create AI or other intelligent life, play for god and at the end our creations will kill us all
Artificial life was invented when JH Conway thought of "the game of life". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life . I'm serious: I believe (as do others) that living, conscious, reproducing beings will exist within a sufficiently large Conway life simulation. Sufficiently large is very large indeed in this context.
...especially for this realistic ejaculating buttplug. Do you have a list of retailers?
Wow, a life form so simple, it's almost indestructable.
TECH SUPPORT!!!
---k--
</stupid>
Or does this whole concept sound like the start of a really bad B horror classic?
If one does create a life form unique to this world would it not automatically qualify by its very nature as an endangered species and therefore be granted Government Protection under the endangered species act and have to be set free in a vast acreage set aside for its proliferation?
Sure it's all fun and games til these scientists kidnap the President's Daughter in an attempt to "cleanse the world."
Did Los Alamos remind anyone else of Las Plagas?
These guys forgot one of the most important rules for playing God. Or playing science, for that matter.
You're supposed to order things like this:
1. Do the work.
2. Issue the press release.
They got the order wrong! When you get the order wrong you're not playing God, you're just playing science fiction writer.
The parent poster "gets" the whole purpose of the experiment - create a primitive life form, such as might have been found over 3 billion years ago on this planet, but using different chemistry. If this can be done, the door is suddenly wide open for the possibility of life in radically different environments from Earth's.
DISCLAIMER: I did not RTFA - I heard about this experiment on last week's NOVA.
Isn't it just easier to have sex to create life? Buncha nerds.
well if they can succeed to make it, and then show a method where it may have created the first single cell organisms, would this prove the evolution theory? i'd love to see them speed up the mutation process so in 1 year u could possibly see a whole new organism made, but thats wishful thinking, and no doubt rome would send in their elite spies to destroy the work, for fear it disproves god.
Still, it is amazing the capabilities of birds and other animals with much smaller and simpler brains than humans. My opinion is that we will have something we recognize as intelligent in computer AI long before we reach human complexity.
Forget diamonds, copyright is forever.
When this story first appeared in February, I wrote an extensive review and analysis for my own blog, Alcaide's Café, http://www.alcaidecafe.com/. I was especially talking about it from the perspective of the evolution versus Intelligent Design debate, so titled it, "'It's Alive!' Sez They. "'It's an Intelligent Design!" Sez I." (Published March 1, 2005) Trying to "create life" has been going on in laboratories for centuries. This is just one of several attempts going on now. A lot of the discussion going on here is right on the money. A couple of points you might have missed: (1) It's interesting to note that Packard essential admits that science has yet to be able to even say what "life" is, what indicates "life", what tells us "something" is living! (2) He's decided to define life as something that can "evolve", which is one way to end the debates about evolution! (3) The threshold between matter and structures and processes and whatever it is that is a "living thing" (say, a living cell) is very huge! Just as it takes a lot to transform mud into a 3 story office building full of staff (which is what "nature" is said to have done), or even a junkyard full of already-manufactured car parts into an operating car (which is about what Packard is trying to do), it takes a lot to transform the elements into a living cell.
Alcaide's Cafe,