Slashdot Mirror
Evolution Machine Accelerates Genetic Engineering
chrb writes "New Scientist has an article about the Evolution Machine — a device which can accelerate directed artificial evolution to discover desirable DNA changes in days rather than years. One of the aims of these researchers is to create an organism that is genetically immune to all viruses."
Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!
( I for one welcome our new Dalek overlords )
Even if it were possible, is it a good idea?
"Hey I know, let's make something that reproduces and can't be killed en-masse."
Or, in short, let's make an even more indestructible cockroach.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
"One of the aims of these researchers is to create an organism that is genetically immune to all viruses."
Jesus, somebody stop them NOW. We don't even have a superhero to fight that thing yet, what the fuck are they thinking?
I wonder how easily it could be used to engineer the opposite case: a virus against which humans have no effective defenses.
Heck, just make on that takes out chickens, cows, and pigs, and humans all of a sudden have a major protein deficiency until alternatives (nuts, fish, etc.) could be ramped up, which would probably take at least 1-2 years.
Mr. Davros to the white courtesy telephone, please:
ever since the dawn of modern agriculture, protein has come largely from beans.
especially in the America's where cows and pigs did not exist until circa 1500 AD when the europeans introduced them (along with their zoonotic diseases).
When you select for resistant bacteria growing in the presence of antibiotics, there is usually a fitness tradeoff for that resistance. Suppose now instead that we have some virus-resistant organism we've engineered. This means all the virus receptors on the surface of the cell no longer bind virus particles, and if you've done this for *many* virus receptors, then you've mutated a lot of cell-surface proteins. I can't imagine this would go without fitness cost.
On the other hand, from studying influenza I can say that viruses evolve much faster than we do and if a variant (maybe adapted to another host) or subtype emerges that can bind your receptor anyway, then in effect you've selected out variants but not stopped the virus. Getting regular vaccines are still the way to go on this, IMO.
How does that follow? Just because there existed a record that could destroy X, you can't conclude that there will exist one that can destroy Y.
Marvel's High Evolutionary
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Actually, what they (Church and Jacobsen) are proposing, long term, is to create bacteria/cells/whatever that use a different DNA coding -- meaning they wouldn't be able to exchange DNA with anything that uses "natural" DNA coding, meaning anything already alive, even viruses. Basically a built-in firewall to prevent cross-contamination in either direction. Pretty ingenious, really. If you look at the "Changing the genetic code" diagram here you'll get the idea. Of course, I suspect we'd find that we'd soon get new viruses that also used this new coding, and contaminated these new cell lines.
How do Gödel's incompleteness theorems apply to creating an organism immune to all viruses?
Gödel's incompleteness theorem states, in relevant part, that no Slashdot discussion is complete without someone vaguely referring to a theory they know little to nothing about in the desperate hope of getting modded up.
(Thanks in advance for the answer).
No problem.
Call me dumb but I still don't follow. If you don't mind, can you dumb it down again? :)
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Why would what we do prove anything about what some other hypothetical entity might have done?
Does the fact that I had stir-fry for dinner last night prove anything about what other people had for dinner last night? No. It simply means I, myself, had stir fry.
Similarly, the fact that we, an "intelligent" species are now sort of creating and designing life-forms says only that we, an "intelligent" species are now sort of creating and designing life-forms. It does not say we were created by an intelligent designer, it does not say that other living things were created by an intelligent designer, and it bears absolutely no relevance what-so-ever to the validity or invalidity of the concept of intelligent design as it is usually meant.
The only version of "intelligent design" this proves is the trivial and literal case: intelligent beings designing things. But we've been doing that, to one extent or another, as a species since we first began domesticating animals and crops. That trivial and literal case still does absolutely nothing to prove or disprove the usual meaning of intelligent design.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
This article is hyped up to the stars.
It's good work, but the ideas aren't "revolutionary" the way they are portrayed.
Lateral gene transfer in bacteria has been known for a long time. It's how resistance to antibiotics is spread among bacteria for example.
It's also been used a good deal already by microbiologists/biochem types (that line is getting a little blurred these days).
Church's group has found a way to automate this.
They can create large numbers of bacterial strains which have some or all of the desired characteristics in a short time.
The downside is the needle of the desired organism is in a haystack of partially successful or unsuccessful ones. In this case, it was linked to production of a bright red chemical. You could determine which was closer to the right one by color. That's easy to automate.
Most characteristics won't be that easy to screen or automate.
Church then goes into what's really an old idea. Encrypting the genome so that it's resistant to existing virus types. You then use a modified ribosome to translate that into proteins. I remember discussions of that in the late 80/early 90s on some of the transhumanist newsgroups (anyone remember usenet?).
The devil in the details here is that much of the information in the genome isn't for coding proteins directly, but for regulating gene expressions and other purposes. Much of that latter we still don't understand. It's hard to design an encryption to preserve a functionality you don't understand.
So, instead of throwing up their hands, Church et al appeal to using the above automated method and the microbes to sort out something that works, but again we really won't understand. At least at first.
It's an interesting idea. Sounds like a lot of work even if automated.
But, as anyone who was caught up in the genetic algorithms craze in computers can attest, it's not a guaranteed solution.
What I'm saying with the above (and I hit submit before I typed this, alas) is that AA individuals are disproportionately impoverished or low income/education in the US, and consequently will be overrepresented in statistics that are influenced heavily by economic factors.
Look at any public health issue and it's actually income and education that play the largest role in disparities, not race. To try and paint it solely as a racial picture without acknowledging the very real role economics plays avoids the real issues at play and also leads to "solutions" that don't actually address the underlying causes.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
IANAM, but AFAIK GÃdel's incompleteness theorems apply to almost everything except axiomatic set theories specifically designed to avoid it. Likely what the OP referred to was that the sought isolation is highly improbable since in order to interact with its environment and therefore be a "living organism" it needs to be subject to death and disease and permeable to such currents of life. GITs sort of says that all systems fail when they get complex enough, which might not be a reason for solipsism since that would assume that the universe is fundamentally a logical place.
What I think is that these researchers are imagining is an island of stability and perfection, or an ultimate immune system, but I think life is more about having the right tool for the job and finding your niche.
All rites reversed 2010
To elaborate on that, the incompleteness theorem is an essential part of the time-honored slashdot tradition of proof by anal extraction. Bullshit - it ain't just for breakfast any more.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
" to create an organism that is genetically immune to all viruses."
And hungry. Very, very hungry. With the ability to smell neurons.
But viruses are already mostly immune to other viruses. Most (or all?) antivirals try to stop the virus from either entering or reproducing in the host cell; not to outright kill the virus If the virus itself doesn't use standard DNA/RNA replication, it's not going to be able to replicate in a normal host cell, so it would be pretty much harmless (unless you also had an organism that used that type of replication).
And a bacteria-like organism that uses a new type of replication, while it could be as deadly as any current bacteria, it's not going to be particularly more immune to antibacterial drugs, given that these don't usually work by interacting directly with the bacteria's RNA. (Nor do we ever, that I know of, send in viruses to attack bacteria . . .)
The real fear would be that they accidentally evolve a new bacteria that has all sorts of immunities to our various anti-bacterial drugs, regardless of its method of replication.
In Greg Egan's "The Moat", this is exactly what a group of people do - breed a new race of humans using non-standard base pairs, thereby meaning that they cannot interbreed with anyone, just the "genetically superior" members of their own race: and rendering them immune to all viruses and preventing imperfection creeping in from quick forays into the bushes with the "inferior" milkman.
I doubt we'd find viruses adapted to the new chemistry very fast. Finding a way to metabolise a new chemical (eg E. coli and citric acid) is a long long way from being able to totally replace all the base pairs in an offspring in one go. The way I understand it, a half-formed mutation (eg replacing only two of four bases) would be line-ending, as the offspring could then not infect any cell, normal or "new". It's not impossible, but it would presumably take a long time to make that jump, perhaps by some more roundabout way, like a dual-stack approach. So, IPv6 vs IPv4 in biological terms then.
Sounds like a perfect recipe for a biological disaster. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?