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Team Claims Synthetic Life Feat

Posted by Zonk on from the it's-alive-it's-aliiiiiive dept.

gertvs writes "According to the BBC scientists in the US have taken a step towards producing life from scratch in the laboratory by having successfully transplanted an entire genome from one bacterium cell to another. This technique could possibly lead to the creation of 'designer' microbes producing fuel or help cleaning toxic waste. 'The ultimate plan is to stitch together artificial chromosomes, proteins and other building blocks with the aim of jumpstarting their designer microbe to life. But Dr. [Craig] Venter concedes that this may be a long way away, but he says he has taken an important key step towards that goal. His team, essentially, snatched the body of another life-form and invaded it with a new genetic code. This, he says, will be a key tool in testing the artificial chromosomes - or DNA bundles - he plans to make. '"

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Penrose by headkase · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If Penrose turns out to be right (The Emperor's New Mind) and quantum-like operations are needed to truly reproduce intelligence then inevitably at some point in the future we will have artificial intelligence even if we have to program some meat to use the same building materials nature used with us.
    Other uses could be to adapt humans to non-terran environments. Base-line in brain just tailored to an alternate environment.

    --
    Shh.
    1. Re:Penrose by Cyberax · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Penrose was probably smocking crack when he wrote this book.

      You definitely don't NEED quantum computers to reproduce intelligence. That's because IF cells contain quantum computers, then they must work in cycles: load initial data, process it, read data. Reading computation results stops quantum computer (collapses it to one state). Even Penrose admits that quantum computers can't work more than a fraction of second in a living cell.

      Quantum computers can be simulated by classical computers (they're computationally equivalent), so quantum computers are not NEEDED to simulate human mind.

      However, quantum computers might make good accelerators for neural processing (there are several publications on this).