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A Step Closer to Creating Artificial Life
slick_shoes writes to mention that Italian researcher Giovanni Murtas has taken another step towards creating life in a test tube. "To the untrained eye, the tiny, misshapen, fatty blobs on Giovanni Murtas's microscope slide would not look very impressive. But when the Italian scientist saw their telltale green fluorescent glint he knew he had achieved something remarkable — and taken a vital step towards building a living organism from scratch. The green glow was proof that his fragile creations were capable of making their own proteins, a crucial ability of all living things and vital for carrying out all other aspects of life."
If this technique (as mentioned in the article) can be used to artificially create fuel it can eliminate oilspills, because fuel can be produced where it is needed. Saves lots of coastal birds.
If this can be used to create artificial meat (now I'm extrapolating) there's no more need to have hurdes of hamburgers grazing away at acres of former rainforest. Saves many of those endangered but unknown species you're talking about. Maybe it can even be used to grow artifical hardwood.
Sounds to me this is exactly the sort of research that eliminates the impact of human consumption on the environment by making it more efficient.
This new Bioshock game is pretty nice and all, but really does nothing to help those kids living with AIDS in South Africa. What the fuck.
That is a very close minded comment. By the same token I guess everybody working on computer science is wasting their time as they should be studying cancer research and trying to find a cure (and just running folding@home doesn't count).
The fact is, different people are good at different fields. Just because someone is a biologist or scientist in general does not mean that they studying all fields of biology. It is a highly specialized field with many different niches. Sure, the niches that some fill may not *seem* to be cutting edge high profile making the headlines ground breaking research. However, every bit of info that is documented may be useful someday.
And by the way... I think being able to build something from scratch is a pretty damn good way of learning out something works and how to help it.
Well, it is Natural Selection, which only goes to show how insufficient an excuse natural selection is. Humans are a natural selection pressure force (unless you believe that we were placed here by divine or other supernatural powers...pleh) just like any other species. Humans are unlike most in that we can, if we choose, attempt to gain awareness of what our effects are, and modulate some of them with a bit of effort. That we can change things to accord to some moral conception of proper living within an ecology or not is a different issue, quite beyond the notion that it is, at base natural selection at work.
The problem here is you are identifying a normative impulse in the phrase Natural Selection (natural=good, artifical=bad...roughly) and then complaining that the normative meanings being assigned are insufficient to describe the actual moral consequences of the situation. I'd say it would be better to read "natural selection" as a descriptive term only, and take moral considerations where they belong, which is in identifying when and how human actions can be good or bad.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)