US Scientist Creates Artificial Life

Joshocar writes "The sometimes-controversial US scientist Craig Venter has announced that he has created artificial life. Venter stated that it is 'a very important philosophical step in the history of our species ... We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.' In the lab, Venter was able to construct and write genetic code from laboratory chemicals. The next step is to insert this code into a cell, which has already been demonstrated in the past. This ability to write genetic code could result in new ways to combat global warming and new drugs, but it could also lead to new bio-weapons."

Comments

There are few more steps

[suv4x4]

We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.

So ok, first 3 steps were:

1. figure out there's such a thing as "genetic code"
2. read genetic code
3. write genetic code

There are two more steps:

4. write some genetic code that results in something sensible
5. write some genetic code that results in something sensible, and that's useful for us

Arguably steps 4 and 5 are the hardest possible steps for us to conquer :) At some point I suspect scientists will realize it's impossible to keep tinkering at things on the gene-by-gene level.

We'll see "genetic frameworks" with reusable piece that have well known behavior, and genetical development kits that simulate assemblies' features and behavior much faster than doing full-blown atom-by-atom simulation.

Genetical programming will be born :)

But, oh damn, forget my wild dreams, back to Earth: let's make some drugs and bio-weapons!

and I am creating a new work of literature

[semiotec]

with the writing of this post!

From just a fast read of the article, I think the claim "creating" a new life is a bit exaggerated.

It's pared down from the genome of a pre-existing species and probably permuted the organisation of the genes on the chromosomes, therefore not much "creation" was involved, they just figured out what genes are not essentially for cell/organism viability and removed them. Granted, a LOT of work had to have been done to stitch together the final artificial chromosome, but still, I think it would be more correct to say it's an artificially _modified_ chromosome rather than created.

Gene therapy labs often play with the HIV virus, by taking out the nasty bits and put in replacement genes, to study whether it is an effective delivery system.

Scientists have difficulty predicting function and structure of known/natural proteins/genes, let alone making new ones. However, gene modification is very common, for example, GFP (green fluorescent protein) is commonly modified to fluoresce other colours. And genome paring is also pretty common, there was a group that removed 5 MB (megabases) from mouse genome and the mice still looked and behaved normally _in_the_lab_, can you claim that they were a new species of mouse?

Last I heard, the Mayo lab (http://www.mayo.caltech.edu/research.html) has created a completely novel gene which produced a protein that folded as they predicted it would. I haven't followed up on the progress since then.

Sure, it took tremendously amount of effort, but it's still exaggeration. An example, perhaps a bit unfair, but it's like saying people who pared down Windows installations by removing non-essential files are "creating" new operating systems.