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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."
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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Freakin scientists. Go cure cancer or something, will ya?!
well, yes, creationists - when we have constructed life - will point out that we have failed to conjure forth mass from nothing. When we have constructed mass - they will point out that we have only converted some other energy into mass. The difference between creation and construction is entirely political and insubstantial - if we believe first life arose on its own, in the primordial ooze, we still believe that that it was constructed of smaller particles....
Lots of seemingly meaningless scientific pursuits have led to things that have had huge impacts on human life.
I seem to recall a silly woman, who specialized in x-ray crystallography, taking a picture of a molecule she wasn't supposed to be wasting her time on. If it weren't for Rosalind Franklin doing that, the discovery of the structure of DNA would have been delayed for god only knows how long.
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
But at some point we run the risk of creating a new life that will seek to perpetuate its survival at the expense of our own.
Science without restraint and wisdom is as superstitious and downright dangerous as the more irrational aspects of religion.
Religion at its worst will keep us in the dark ages, while science at its worst will lead to a runaway extinction event by means of environmental pollution or epidemic.
There has to be a balance.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Imagine a bug that can convert cellulose to alcohol. Or eats dioxins and destroys them. Or generates hydrogen from sun and water. Wouldn't these be somewhat beneficial?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I completly agree. Does GWB even knows that this is happening in a federal lab, using federal taxpayer money?? I have a feeling that we'll soon have a taste of category 6 and higher hurricanes if we continue this way...
I must pray over this.
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.)
Just to remind everyone, it's not playing God if you aren't creating life with pure will power alone...
Beyond some undefinable religious aspect I suspect you're hinting at, what's the difference between the two words?
AccountKiller
I'm hoping the parent was trying to be funny (the sasser worm??) but may inflame people who actually think like this, so I'll bite. And yes, this is relevant.
In all the "we are playing god" arguments that I've heard, I ask "where in the Bible/Talmud/Torah/Qur'an does it say 'Ye shall not create life'?". No one can ever give me a direct quote where it says we are forbidden from doing so. So, with that in mind, and given that we are given, the parent would say, from our devine creator, the gifts of intelligence AND curiosity, who is to say that we are not expressly ALLOWED to do this because we were granted the abilities. Now I'm sure I'll get replys that say "well, I'm given the ability to kill or steal, but it doesn't mean that I'm ALLOWED to do so..." and for the asshat that comes up with this argument, I'll counter with: Taking Life or Doing Harm (TM), in that intent, is usually a direct, willful act of agression. Creating, whether it be life, or a painting, or a controversial book, is not intended to be directly harmful in most cases, especially if the intent is to learn, or open a discourse, etc. Sure, some science has yielded results that might be harmful to someone in some circumstance, but I, driving my car to work, might be harmful to someone, in some circumstance, whether it be hitting them or poisoning the air of their great grand children and causing global warming, the seas to melt, and all of us end up doing bad Kevin Costner impersonations. My point is, and this is my own opinion, that the intent of most of the religious texts of the world seem to be "don't be evil bastards." How can creation be evil, when it's A) not intended to be evil, and B) Not even expressly forbidden? (that I know of)
Flame away!
Simple - the first life wasn't a cell. It was a bit of DNA or RNA floating in a sea rich in organic chemicals. Eventually the bits of what we'd call genes which created proteins that formed a crude shell were more likely to survive (some insulation against changing conditions). Then this little viruslike thingy got in and started making ATP and the cell ended up using that for fuel; The virus-thingy became a mitochondria. Then these simple cells competed and started adding dongles to help them compete. And then the perpetual arms race began, all the cells trying to 1-up each other with the newest addition or minor tweak.
But for each 'stage' I described I probably left out 20 or 30 others...
It just proves that life COULD be made through intelligent deisign (although it would short circuit the notion that only a 'higher power' has such capability.
It doesn't disprove the notion that life could be a product of stochastic processes.
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.
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.
I think this is an important question in biology, and I'm sure no biologist would deny it. The problem comes when the creationists merely assume god must have done anything we can't explain. It's the "god in the gaps" argument that's been popular probbably since we first learned to communicate. The problem of course is that science marches on and when you try to find your god in the gaps of science, science eventually closes those gaps. Religion always fights like mad because they've invested much of their belief structure in the argument. The gaps used to be in evolution. Those gaps have closed and now the gaps have moved to the creation of life itself.
The point that people like you were talking to seem to miss is that assuming the existence of a god to explain current lack of scientific understanding of scientific questions has always been a losing proposition. Where religion always fails is when it gets mixed up with scientific questions. Science adapts, and religion tries to cling to dogma. Religion changes too perhaps.. no one is seriously pissed off about heliocentrism anymore, it just takes about 100 times longer.
AccountKiller
You really need to look no further than the virus. It is little more than a small bit of DNA or RNA and a protective coating. They generally are parasites on cells since they don't have some of the machinery to reproduce on their own, but as you can tell from the epidemics and pandemics they cause they are a quite successful form of life at its most elemental level.
One things people who fall for intelligent design refuse to appreciate is that life has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve and perfect itself. We can't get our heads around that but that is an enormous number of cycles of mutation and natural selection that would inevitably lead to great diversity and complexity over time. Living organisms have to work because if they don't they die. All the failed mutations are dead, we only see the ones that worked so we are amazed life works but if it didn't we wouldn't be here to judge.
You would be really hard pressed to explain why an intelligent omnipotent being would have made all the design mistakes that we carry with. For example why would an intelligent designer give us an appendix that frequently threatens to kill us.
"and they dispute that such a thing could have evolved out of less complex parts."
So where did their creator and intelligent designer come from then? I think I could visualize random interactions of molecules leading to life better than I could that there is some omnipotent intelligence that has existed for eternity or whom just popped in to existence one day. That is at least as far fetched as amino acids randomly assembling themselves in to a virus or proto cell.
@de_machina
Eugene Koonin and William Martin just came out with a fascinating paper on the LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). Link to Article on Pubmed
In brief: the RNA/DNA/protein worlds evolved at hydrothermal vents in inorganic chambers. At some point, the information molecules sheathed themselves in lipids and sugars, and free-living cells emerged from the vents.
In response to at least one of your questions: the LUCA to cell transition may have taken 500 million years (primordial soup = 3.5bya, 1st evidence of prokaryotes = 3bya). That's not very long on a geologic, or even evolutionary, time scale (about 20x the time for humans to diverge from apes). But it could have been happening at thousands and thousands of vents worldwide, in thousands and thousands of inorganic chambers per vent. All of that combinatorial power adds up.
4-star general in a one-man army.
Microsoftus featuris
Ok, then obviously talking about cells isn't going to get us anywhere. So let's talk about the analogy that ID makes: the mouse trap.
The modern mouse trap has four parts. A base, a spring, a crushing wire and a trigger lever. If you take away any of the parts it doesn't work. The ID argument is that it must have been designed as any small change that removed one of these critical components would render the mouse trap ineffective.
This is a powerful argument, and it is what gets most people suckered into ID. Not because it is a good argument, but simply because you believe the mouse trap was intelligently designed and by drawing analogies to structures seen in nature you fall into the same kind of thinking.
There's one more thing most people are ignorant of that makes the argument powerful: how the modern mouse trap came about. People largely think the modern mouse trap came into the world fully formed without any evolution. Much like Edison's light bulbs, however, the mouse trap actually did evolve. The addition and removal of superfluous parts continues to this day. Designs compete much like genetic variations and the market selects which designs are improved upon.
To suggest that a flagellum or ATP-syntase must have been intelligently designed because it is irreducibly complex is to ask us to believe that no superfluous parts could possibly have been removed from the currently "perfect" design and that the parts which make up the current design could not have served any other purpose (even though I've just mentioned two biochemical systems which have similar components).
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
That's not the way the word is normally used. We say a chef has created a wonderful desert, an artist has created a sculpture, etc.
I am trolling
Maybe so, but it doesn't address the issue of where their creator came from. Unless the creator is inherently less complex than the system it created, you need to explain how this earlier step came into being.
These people seem to take their existance of their god as a given, not requiring explanation.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Don't forget, it happened with quantities and timescales that you cannot easily (let alone physically) comprehend.
*the following are numbers pulled from nowhere, but help to convey the idea*
So, it takes a billion (1,000,000,000) years for single-celled organisms to evolve. On planet with at least a billion-billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) bits of organic building blocks in it's oceans, randomly and constantly thrown together. So if it's a one in a million chance to do a particular step on the road to life, it'll probably happen a million times a second worldwide for a billion years.
When you look at the numbers like *that*, the odds are pretty good you'll get something like life out the other end.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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.
get whipped (you know you like it)
Sorry, but as others have pointed out this isn't the way the word created is used or understood by anyone but probbably yourself. By your definition NOTHING is created except by a god. People DO use this word quite commonly when referring to things not created by a god.
Your word definitions are thus extremely confusing because you're using a word with an existing definition and giving it a new definition contrary to the accepted definition. I could for example define cat as an aquatic animal that swims in the sea, but if I used my definition of the word cat in conversation expecting people to understand my personal definition, no one would understand me.
AccountKiller
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
Has it occurred to you that the problem lies with some practishoners of said religions, rather than the religions themselves?
To be sure, some practitioners are more annoying than others. However that they are doesn't remove the inherit fallacies which exist in those religions.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Actually, you are. I was disagreeing with the compairson between needing to show how non-organic chemicals turned into life with arguments about the origin of God. I was showing that in order to say that the first occured requires you to find a scientific process whereby it is liekly to occur. If you can't, then there is no reason to support the theory. God, on the other hand, does not require an origin or a scientific explanation of his existence.
Where did I say that?
If the grandparent was saying that then he's misinformed as God has already said who he is and that he didn't come from anywhere, if the Biblical account is true.
No, I'm saying that the theory that non-rganic chemicals could change via a scientific process into life is thus far lacking in evidence. There is no reason for me, as a scientist, to trust it.
I wasn't trying to help us understand, preserve or improve life. I simply pointing out a flaw in a comaprison that GP made.
|I'm an evangelical with a degree in Physics so I knida agree on that :^)
I half agree with you there. Science doesn't tell us how the universe works. It merely gives us a description of how it appears to work, based on observations. The underlying truth of how it works could be completely different, but as long as the model gives us results that match our observations, we can't really tell the difference and we're happy. I guess we're getting into the realms of philosophy of science here. In fact I'm coming round to the view that all science degrees should have a compulosry philosophy of science component in the first year.
Anyway, science is handy for making prediciotns about the future and figuring out the likely reason why something happened in the past. Trouble is that it's possible fore God to go and do something miraculous and then for our observations to not be able to tell the difference between that and something ordinary happening. Hypothetically, if God created the world in 6 dyas in a per-aged satate, so that it looked like it was 13.7 billion years old, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and a universe that really was created 13.7 billion years old. As long as the univer works as if it was 13.7 billion years old, then we can build our scientific models on the assumption that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. It might only be a few thousand years old in reality, but it makes no difference to our models. Too many people (including many scientists) don't seem to get this, which is quite sad because it ends up with a lot of scientists wasting their time warring with religion and a lot of religious people bashing science in the name of God.