Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Build Possibly The First Man-Made Genome
hackingbear writes "Wired is reporting that researchers have created the longest synthetic genome to date by threading together four long strands of DNA. 'Leading synthetic biologists said with the new work, published Thursday in the journal Science, the first synthetic life could be just months away — if it hasn't been created already. [...] The ability to synthesize longer DNA strands for less money parallels the history of genetic sequencing, where the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped from hundreds of millions of dollars to about $10,000. Just a few years ago, synthesizing a piece of DNA with 5,000 rungs in its helix, known as base-pairs, was impossible. Venter's new synthetic genome is 582,000 base-pairs.' As a programmer, I'm most excited by the possibility of a new platform and the programming jobs that will be created by it."
If Venter and company royally screw-up, and create some bug that kills us all, or turns the biosphere to a pile of gray goo, nobody's going to make any money off of dandy, new, commoditized designer life forms. Where do I complain?
But Jesus, and the Bible!
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
will they use this technology to create a life form who is programmed to create other life forms?
Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! IT'S A NET!!!*
*My apologies for this horrendously bad joke
Living With a Nerd
If that can be achieved (much like a Florida geneticist once made THC-producing orange trees) then you'll single-handedly kick the War on Drugs' ass. That would be a worthy cause right there.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Geez. The LAST thing society needs is a bunch of synthesized clones running around with hacked up spaghetti code for genes.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
I will have my four-legged chicken! (The drumstick is my favorite part)
The article does not say if it's methylated in the right places.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
As a regular guy, I am NOT excited by the thought of thousands of fat, greasy programmers drooling over a test tube and a well worn copy of "Weird Science."
As my friend Han was so fond of saying, "I've got a bad feeling about this."
The final line of the paragraph scares me to death - I haven't met a programmer whom I'd turn loose on a DNA construction. It would be like handing a loaded, fully-automatic weapon, with the safety ground off, to a three-year-old; or asking them to complete a fully distributed ERP system written in assembler.
Just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we SHOULD. Perhaps if we constructed a complete corpus of biological effects, and dependencies of all currently known sequences (yeah right, like we're going to sequence every living organism on the planet) we could at least reasonably predict what the effect of NEW sequences might be. Until then the human race is the three-year-old. The gun is loaded. (waiting for the bang...)
Dennis Dumont
In the article, Venter says that they will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications. I think that there is already plenty of evidence that genetic systems have procedural abstraction. In talking about gene activation, Biologists often use the term "ordered cascade" to describe what's happening when one gene activates a few more and those genes, in turn, activate other genes. If you think about it, it's exactly like subroutines of a program. Construction of the bacterial flagellum, for example, starts with the activation of one gene, which activates others, leading to the contribution of about 25 genes. These genes contribute various parts of the flagellum and activation of the cellular machinery to put it together and attach it to the cell wall.
As a programmer, I'm most excited by the possibility of a new platform and the programming jobs that will be created by it.
And who's going to debug all the billions of self-reproducing monsters you unleash into the world, pray tell?
582k ought to be enough for anybody.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications. I think that there is already plenty of evidence that genetic systems have procedural abstraction.
Sounds to me like programming in Prolog.
For those who don't know... A Prolog program is a set of patterns and actions. When a pattern is "matched" it action occures. The set is unordered. A more modern and more widely used version of this is the language "Erlang". I think Erlang points to the way we will write very large systems in the future. For one thing it scales well to systems that have many, many cores. Procedural languages just don't scale so well. Also I think this style of programming could be adapted to formal methods, proof of correctness and so on.
Back to DNA. I think DNA simply reacts to patterns in it's environment with all of the DNA "looking" for these patterns pretty much in parallel
Still, I can't help but wonder... is the entire universe against me? Or just the part where light has reached since my birth? Don't laugh; it's an important question.
You need a genetic sample [of Christ]
Acquire a Catholic who has just taken communion and induce him to vomit, thereby producing a viable sample of body and blood.
Who says science and faith aren't compatible?
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
It doesn't even need to be a "super" virus that we haven't seen before. The smallpox virus's genome has been sequenced and published in publicly-available literature back when everyone assumed you could never synthesize it from scratch. Smallpox has a DNA genome that is only 186,000 base pairs long--shorter than Venter appears to have already synthesized. This means that Venter, or anyone who has the same technology, could probably synthesize the smallpox genome from scratch. Now I'm absolutely not a virologist, scientist, or doctor of any kind, but it seems like at that point, you'd only need to insert that genome into a capsid that was "good enough" to shoehorn the viral genome into a human cell (even if the capsid being used wasn't the actual smallpox capsid). After that, the genome would take over the cell, start churning out copies of actual smallpox virions, and the WHO has already noted that a single human infected with smallpox constitutes an immediate global health emergency due to its infectiousness, its lethality, and the fact that most of the global population hasn't been immunized. I'm no fan of the Commerce Department's export control system by any means, but this technology appears potentially far more dangerous for producing weapons of mass destruction than any nuclear weapon development tool ever was. If we wind up in a situation where anyone with a master's in biology and a lab can synthesize smallpox, it seems naive to assume that no one will do anything stupid or malevolent. Twelve Monkeys, anyone?
Certainly does need debugging...you're missing a close paren in both versions.