Biologist (Almost) Creates Artificial Life

Aditya Malik writes "Wired has an interesting story up about how a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building 'protocells' from artificial molecules which are very close to satisfying the conditions for being 'alive.' 'Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.' This obviously raises some questions about creationism, not to mention some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."

Comments

Intelligent design

[suck_burners_rice]

If this experiment is successful, it will finally prove, once and for all, that life was not created by intelligent design. How will it prove that? Well, if an intelligent being (the aforementioned biologist) succeeds in creating a life form, then it follows, logically, that the life form he creates is not the result of the work of an intelligent being. It's simple logic, and any idiot can see that.

Incidentally, all the generations that came before ours thought that life came from some intelligent being, but they were all stupid because they didn't live in the enlightened world that we live in today. There were no cars, computers, airplanes, and other technologies. They didn't have the Internet or Wikipedia. Thus, they were stupid. Today, we're much smarter than that and we know better than to believe in such nonsense.

Re:Self Replicating?

[philspear]

That's strong evidence? I would say that's evidence that appears to challenge the hypothesis, but I think it's quite a leap to say that suggests they were warm blooded.

Re:Says nothing about creationism

[c_forq]

I am familiar with the pre-RNA hypothesis, but think it falls just as flat as the abiogenesis theories it is trying to replace. Particularly I have seen nothing explaining the gap between RNA molecules and reproducing cells. Not exactly a trivial step(s).

This article was (almost) worth reading

[birdguy]

Not!