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."

Comments

Only a matter of time

[FlyByPC]

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.

Re:Only a matter of time

[heinousjay]

Math-wise, computers are far more intelligent than the average individual at computation.

Maybe you don't realize just how much calculus is involved in walking down stairs.

The human brain is a computation engine of more power than people understand. It just doesn't happen at a conscious level, so we're not always aware of it. Our brains operate at a level far above raw computational power, which is really all our machines are good at right now.

Re:Only a matter of time

[Shihar]

And the most insidious unintended consequence of our advance in medicine, most people don't appreciate, we have extended our life spans, if you have the money, to the point that we live much longer than we should, we have people living a poor quality of life for decades in their 80's and 90's draining societies resources, and worse we are producing an exploding population. I'm not sure near technology synthesized immortality is such a great thing. There is benefit in the renewal that comes with the old dieing and letting young, fresh people take over.

I think you are looking at life expansion from entirely the wrong perspective. First, life expansion does NOT create a population boom. All of the rich western European nation are in a death cycle right now. Their populations are shrinking. Wealth and the ability to live a long time causes people to simply choose to not have as many children. This is an extremely well documented correlation. The US itself would be in a death cycle like Europe if it wasn't for its influx of immigrants.

Life expansion does not result in a drastically lower standard of living. Being old isn't what makes being old suck. Having your organs fail, your bones become brittle, mental illness, and muscle loss are the reasons why being old is no fun. Fortunately, extending life requires dealing with all of the above. If you have ever watched a National Geographic on a tribe with low life expectancy, you will notice that a 35 year old man looks like an 80 year old American or European. That isn't to suggest that we keep people alive beyond what they would be able to be naturally in the same state, but it isn't right to assume that when people were dying at the age of 40 they were dying looking and feeling like a 40 year old of today.

More importantly, life expansion these days almost entirely revolves around "solving" old age. If someone was to live to be 200 years old, you can bet that they have 'solved' old age and that 200 year old person probably looks about 30. You simply can't extend peoples' lives much longer without curing the natural degradation that your body suffers as you get older.

Finally, I think you drastically overlook the social good that old age offers. In a society where people become older and older, you have people building up vast reservoirs of experience and knowledge. The only social ill old age brings is retirement, and as you see people living longer and healthier lives, you are going to see the retirement age kicked out further. I wouldn't be surprised in a decade or two when life expansion hits its next big surge that our way of thinking about retirement gets radically altered. 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.

Re:Only a matter of time

[localman]

We are certainly moving towards artificial intelligence. We actually have programs that can write themselves to a limited degree. And so we'll probably have artifical intelligence shortly.

Care to take a bet on that? :)

I don't believe there is anything magical about the brain, and I believe it can be reproduced in a man-made form. But I think it is far far more complex than we yet realize. Even the most advanced neural nets of today are nowheres near the level of complexity of even a rodent brain. And I'm not just talking about the number of neurons. I'm talking about the secondary effects -- the self-organizing nature of the brain, and how different parts, with slightly different layouts are used for vastly different processing tasks. We're still a long ways off. If I had to guess I'd say not within the next 50 years. Perhaps much longer.

And I don't believe that we'll achieve intelligence through direct programming, even through self modifying programs. If you can look at the low level and tell what's happening at the top level (like with a program) then it's far to simple to encode intelligence. Intelligence requires layers of meaning.

Nonetheless, an interesting topic.

Cheers.

Well. that's one way

[inode_buddha]

Well. that's one way to get a life.

Re:Focus on Artificial life

[audacity242]

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.

Re:Not playing God...

[spongman]

I wonder if they'll take the day off when they're done.

Re:PNA?

[Thomas Miconi]

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.