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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."
I create artificial life with a 12 pack of Genny Cream Ales and a Dominos Pizza!
This is my sig.
project Wildfire yet ? There is a fire...
Yep. These are the kinds of things that inspire people to make movies.
But wait, isn't this the same subject they use over and over... Scratch that.
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
I wish more people would invest their intelligence into how to protect the life forms (and that includes everything from slimy single-cell organisms to snow tigers) on this globe that are already there. Nobody will be able to bring them back, ever, after they are gone. And many of them are disappearing, probably most of them unnoticed.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Soon it will eat and outgrow everything!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob
The concept of matter ending up as human beings, and then being aware of its own existence, is mind blowing! Is there a scientific definition for life? I don't mean the using energy and waste - has dna - reproduces - want to will to survive stuff. I hope you understand what I am trying to ask. Like a clump of matter one day, then aware of its own existence the next day, what a transition!!
I've read that some say it just might be that it's all just a bunch of chemical/electrical interactions, but to get to the point where matter contemplates its own existence is just on a different level. So it's big bang heat explosion stars planets...then human beings (albeit much much later). Is that something you can say is a property of matter? That at some point it will know of its own existence?
What's/where's the threshold between a blob of carbon+goo, and me? Or at least, are there any theories? Or is all of this stuff discussed only in the philosphical realm?
For those who want more meat, these look like places to start:
7 85/
n 72/
Pier Luigi Luisi, Francesca Ferri and Pasquale Stano Approaches to semi-synthetic minimal cells: a review
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y218jk71n1k40
Giovanni Murtas Question 7: Construction of a Semi-Synthetic Minimal Cell: A Model for Early Living Cells
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9p404l8247968
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
welcome our green blob overlords
It all seems fine and well, what with creating life artificially but, speaking for all the red blooded American, European, African, and Asian males in the world there is just no substitute for doing it the old fashioned way.
At least that's what I hear.
load "$",8,1
I, for one, welcome our new glowing overlords!
Mouse2: No Way! Get out of here! Lemme look! Darn it, looks like they have done it. What did you call them?
Mouse1: Humans.
Mouse2: What do we do now?
Mouse1: First we need to redraw the plans for the highway, we can no longer run it through Earth. It would be unethical to destroy such an advanced form of life. I never thought they will survive this long though, truth be told.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Just wait a few billion years, and they evolve to the point where they acquire an additional capability :
- starting pointless holy wars about the subject whether they evolved spontaneously, where created by intelligent design or where by a giant flying spaghetti monster.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
People are made out of water, CO2, nitrogen and a dash of salt. Your computer, cell phone, etc are metal and sand. The magic isn't in the matter, it's the pattern it's been arranged in to.
I'm pretty sure the 4 1/2 week old smart chicken in my friends fridge last night was evolving into some sort of lifeform. one with a bad bo problem.
If they are made of exactly the same thing, then what is the difference, or is it kinda like calling Organic chemistry to everything carbon bond related?
Hrm... I knew they sort-of successfully cloned humans, but this is really the next step... I don't know what to think of it.. I mean, there is quite a lot on this planet already that we don't know a lot about. why create a new lifeform? ...probably because "it's possible"...
[ irc.p2p-network.net -> #zomgwtfbbq ][ http://zomgwtfbbq.info ]
What does from scratch mean? Are they using existing cellular and biological materials (i.e. ones that are already partially "assembled")?
Know what they say....
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." ~ Carl Sagan
Not too loud now or George Bush will have you arrested for blasphemy!
You include 'has DNA' in the list of criteria for life specifically, I assume, to exclude alien lifeforms. Is this bigotry innate (and evolved!), or did you have an unfortunate childhood experience with some shales and a magnetic vortex based master intelligence?
As to your question, if you put a learning and abstraction engine into an environment with multiple (near-)copies of itself and ask it to plan for the future, it's pretty clear that the useful (i.e. adaptive) option among the possible outcomes is approximate self-modeling. For many technical reasons it's tricky to get right, but nature had lots of time, and provided plenty of impetus, to work on it.
If you don't think that's a strong enough answer, then consider this: how can you prove to me that you are self-aware? How can you prove to yourself that you are? Reflexive social planning ("I know how to do this, but if I try I will be too scared to go through with it, so I had better take a friend....") is the best evidence you can give me.
"In an interview with Newsweek magazine earlier this year, Dr Venter claimed that a fuel-producing microbe could become the first billion- or trillion-dollar organism. The institute has already patented a set of genes for creating such a stripped-down creature." A fantastic money making idea. However, do we really need an unlimited supply or carbon positive fossil fuels? I can just see the motorways jammed with Stretch Humvees of all shapes and sizes, gracefully spewing that grayish black smoke into our already pissed off atmosphere. With cheaper fuel prices, why walk? why cycle? Everybody will drive. We'll need more and more roads to cope, how will we manage? Bulldose the already thinning vegetation on this planet to build that new bypass we all REALLY need. Shit, it'll be fine, they'll probably come up with an organism that can take carbon dioxide and produce oxygen! Now what a feat that would be, modern science today hey...
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
I don't mean to come off as some sort of Chicken Little or something, but I worry sometimes about scientists getting a little careless. Certainly this research is awesome and I'm all for it, but I hope that there is someone in there really giving some thought to keeping these new lifeforms from getting out and killing everything on the Earth. Scientists often have the attitude that what they are working on is awesome and good and poses no danger to anyone. "These life forms can't possibly hurt us, so why contain them?!" So they take them home on their shirts and the things evolve and bad things happen. Again, I don't want to rain on the awesome parade or anything, but I hope that someone in there is giving this some thought and maybe, once they get somewhere, they'll start taking precautions to contain this new life.
Real men eat soylent green.
I welcome our new overlord, Giovanni Murtas and his army of goo.
Reading the article, it doesn't exactly sound like anyone is truly building life from scratch. Building life from scratch would be assembling from base elements the building blocks of the cell, assmbling from base elements the walls and structure of the cell, putting it all together, and then starting up all the "machinery" and watching the cell come to life. As far as I know, no one has been able to do that, and it doesn't look like these teams are doing that either.
The top down team clearly isn't close to doing things this way, because they are taking already living cells of a simple organism that is already alive and tweaking the DNA, trying to find the minimum set of genes necessary for function.
In contrast, the bottom up team takes enzymes from already alive sells, puts them into a stripped down fatty bag cell and watches them synthesize proteins. That's hardly creating life from scratch. That's taking bits and peices from things already alive and trying to create a new organism out of them. While this technique may indeed succeed in creating a new, minimal organism, there is a large difference between taking nothing but inert, base elements from the periodic table and creating something alive and simply taking peices from other lifeforms (by definition already alive) and assembling a different organism. And there is also a large difference between having enzymes make proteins in a test tube (something that has been done before) and creating something that is alive.
We've never seen anyone truly create life from scratch, and I don't think we are particularly close to that, if it would ever even happen. I think most of this "I've created new life in a test tube!" stuff is propoganda from scientists to gain more funding. Saying "I've created life in a test tube!" tends to sound better and garner more funds than saying "I've tweaked existing life in a test tube!", which is what has actually occurred here.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I find it rather disturbing that one of those groups is creating a new life form out of the bacteria that causes urinary tract infections. Wouldn't it be a kick in the pants if this new life form caused your ..., well you get the idea.
FINALLY! nerds will have (cute) girlfriends!
If you attempt to build life from scratch, you must first create the universe.
If GreenPeace actually SOLVED ANYTHING they would have to close their doors. People fear being out of work. People fear the freedom that would come from solving the energy crisis and every other crisis. We have even come to fear doing the "right thing" by the rest of creation on this planet. Running on money reduces us to a lower form of life that makes stupid decisions. The automobile engine needs a total re-design, makeover. It's designed all wrong. As is now, the highly-efficient combustion engines (all kinds, + factories) are competing with human lungs, which are extremely inefficient. We actually exhale most of the oxygen we inhale. That's one big reason our bodies aren't metabolizing fat. Low oxygen = low metabolic rate. Google search for "self hyperbarics".
. That page also tells how to stop malignant cancers with nutrition-induced chemical burns to the insides of cancer cells while not harming normal cells.
However, once we start doing things right, increment by increment, we will find how glorious it makes us feel. Once we latch onto that things may begin to change. Soon as the head parrot shuts up bragging about the low unemployment rate would help. Telling us slaves {i.e. taxpayers} we all have punch clock jobs is self-serving to those at the top of the Pyramid => http://tinyurl.com/3de6r7
green blobs create you!
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS