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Researcher Builds Life-Like Cells Made of Metal
Sven-Erik writes "Could living things that evolved from metals be clunking about somewhere in the universe? In a lab in Glasgow, UK, one man is intent on proving that metal-based life is possible. He has managed to build cell-like bubbles from giant metal-containing molecules and has given them some life-like properties. He now hopes to induce them to evolve into fully inorganic self-replicating entities. 'I am 100 per cent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology,' says Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow. His building blocks are large 'polyoxometalates' made of a range of metal atoms — most recently tungsten — linked to oxygen and phosphorus. By simply mixing them in solution, he can get them to self-assemble into cell-like spheres."
welcome our new polyoxometalate overlords.
Please make sure that these are vulnerable to projectile weaponry. The last time we had to deal with life forms of this sort, it was a real pain.
Signed,
Col. Jack O'Neill
This has to be the most overhyped, buzzword-ridden science story I've read in months. As a researcher, I hate to see whatever credibility we have spent on things like this.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
When asked in a talk on this, he claimed that they would have fully replicating matter (IE : 'living' inorganic matter) in 2 years. The host who asked the question sounded startled when he said "That would be, er, something amazing, yes" - in other words "Yeah, right!".
On the other hand, the lab's publication list is quite impressive, and full of cool looking polygonal structures : http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/publications.php
Without self-replication I wouldn't call them life, evolution can't work without self-replication of some sort.
So he made some 'bubbles' that don't dissolve and can mimic some simplest properties of a cell like porous membrane. Without self-replication it is not cell or anything resembling life and without some way to change and pass those changes onto next generation there can be no evolution. In related news: I took a cardboard box and painted 'screen' and 'keyboard' on it. It totally proves that laptop can be made from cardboard. Of course it does not work, but this is just a little detail that can be worked out later.
Self replicating nanobots scare me...but only on this planet. Anywhere else and it's a friggin' miracle.
Lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
Which goes to say that Goedel was neither a physicist nor a biologist.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
His goal is not to prove, disprove or otherwise challenge evolution. If he manages to build such life forms (what he did yet definitely isn't one), it will certainly be his creation and would say exactly nothing about evolution, nor is it intended to do. What he wants to prove is that metal based life is possible at all.
I'm also sceptical that he will manage to do it (independent from the question if metallic life forms would be possible in principle). But the point is, no matter if he does, it won't tell anything about evolution either way, nor is it intended to.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Interesting post. I think that you are right, but for the wrong reasons.
As you point out, a major part of the story of life is the growth in complexity. Just having a bounding membrane - Cronin's current claim - is only the first step on a long road. A key next step is - like ATP synthase - to set up an energy source. It is thought by some that the first membranes played an important role in energy capture by allowing primitive cells to set up an ion gradient across them
The problem that I see is a lack of potential in non-carbon structures. The number of possible forms of proteins is very large; the number for polyoxometallates is larger then most inorganic forms but still smaller than organic. So he may get some steps down the road of complexity, but run out of steam (to mix metaphors!) half way there.
Finally, crystal structures only show one feature of life : growth. If he can demonstrate self-replicating, self-repairing, self-bounding, inorganic structures then it will be life.
Perhaps *in theory* you could create some system using metals, but in practice in the real world if there was any carbon around in the system than whatever kicks off "life" would be more likely to end up using that simply because of the flexibility it allows and metal based organisms would soon be outcompeted and go extinct. Also its curious to note that his system still requires water.
Wasn't silicon the carbon alternative a few decades back? Whatever happened to the ideas of alternative life based on that (no, not electronics)?
What he did was inventing a metal-based soap. Wich is impressive, but very far from life.
Whenever I see an article like this about yet another scientist trying to create artificial life I wonder whether they have watched and read too much science fiction or whether they just haven't seen enough science fiction.
> What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing, really. All replicating things need energy and building materials. Biological lifeforms don't contain significant amounts of tungsten, so these cells have exactly nothing to gain by targeting us. In fact most of our environment does not contain significant amounts of tungsten, so outside the lab, these cells will have no chance of spreading. Even if they make it to a giant tungsten supply, they still need phosphorus and oxygen, and the former is probably not kept in close contact with heaps of tungsten.
And even when our metal overlords have access to all these materials, they will still need energy to actually assemble them.
These cells (assuming they even succeed in getting them to live) will be very harmless indeed.
Some scientists write science fiction when they're not researching. Isaac Asimov, for example, held a PhD in biochemistry and did cancer research at Boston University.
Free Martian Whores!
>Note: I am a creation believing christain. I dont believe in evolution. (I do believe in natural selection)
Congratulations, so was Darwin. Now you only have 150 years of biology left to catch up on...
Actually what I think you MEANT to say is that you don't believe in abiogenesis. Evolution is the concept of organisms changing, natural selection is one of the effects that can drive the direction of evolution and almost certainly the most important one but there are others which have been identified (mostly because they cause occasional anomalies like rapid speciation). So evolution is not quite a synonym for natural selection, we moved away from Darwin's terminology since it describes only ONE of the things that control evolution and we now know it's not the ONLY thing that does (though it's by far the most powerful force involved).
But indeed, Darwin believed that God was needed to start the process of life - many scientists today believe this was not required and there are several alternative viable theories. So far none of them are proven... but what would it do to your faith if one was ?
Well, if you're faith is worth having at all... NOTHING. So you figure out another of the tools in God's toolbox, if that means you can't believe in God your faith was worthless in the first place. For those of us who don't believe now, it will be just further proof that there's nothing we can't adequately explain WITHOUT a creator.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>0. As for evolution, consider this: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/0328212/Acquired-Characteristics-May-Be-Inheritable
That is the ancient Lamarckian theorem, just because we've got reason to think that it may have some truth, it says NOTHING about evolution. If anything it strengthens it.
>1. `many scientists today believe this was not required and there are several alternative viable theories': are they really `viable', are todays scientist all that non-error-prone?
You're confusing meanings of "viable". Viable in this context means "could work" not "will work". They are viable in that they make sense, do not violate the known laws of nature and may be true. That is not a claim that they are correct, or that it is what actually happened - we don't have the means (at least not yet) to determine what actually happened, which is the only way to prove any such theory. Even if we used one to create new life tomorrow it wouldn't prove the theory true- it would still remain "viable" only, we'll have given it a LOT more evidence (by showing that it CAN happen that way with absolute certainty) but we would not have proven that it DID happen that way. Science is not non-error-prone, science however has incredibly high standards of testing that it uses to REMOVE errors. Where testing is impossible (or at least very difficult) theories hold less weight. That we can't know for sure if it was crystaline or clay or any of the other theories of abiogenesis doesn't weaken science, it's proof of science's resilience in that it refuses to call a theory "Fact" without being able to check.
2> ...
Your whole paragraph is entirely non-sensicle. Showing that the universe and life can come to exist in it's present state without a conscious creation process reduces the need to invoke a creator to explain it. All religion, including your own, came from our ancestors inabillity to explain things. Now we can explain (almost) all of them, and their explanation (some big all-powerful guy did it) holds a LOT less water.
The simple truth is - if you believe in God, that's your right, but don't mix theology and science because they have NOTHING in common (except origins - a long, long time ago - both tried to explain the world to people). Science questions itself, religion does not - this makes them fundamentally incompatible. You can believe in God and accept science as valuable, but you cannot pretend that the one can enligthen you about the other. To reject a scientific idea on the grounds that it conflicts with religion is hypocrisy unless you are equally willing to reject a religious idea on the grounds that it conflicts with science.
Either way you're playing a very difficult mental balancing game between a way of thinking built on rationality and demand of proof and consistent, critical self-questioning versus one built on "do and think as you are told".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>Evolution is taught as a concept things changing but it makes the grand claim of things improving upon themselves to do it, by gaining complexity and self forming into "higher" life forms.
No, it does not. Evolution simply favors that which survives the best. Sometimes it does so by REDUCING complexity. A good example: frog genomes are nearly 500 times more complex than human genomes (that is - they have about 500 times as many genes as we do). Yet frogs have been around a lot longer than we are and are way more primitive. But frog DNA has to deal with all sorts of things - a tadpole in an egg needs to develop at a certain rate, that implies chemical reactions and chemical reactions are temperature sensitive. So if it gets warmer the enzymes need to have things added that slow down the reactions, if it gets colder other things are added to speed them up. Frog DNA are filled with countless little variations of "if temperature is between X and Y add enzyme Z" for every proteine in their bodies.
Humans (in fact all mammals) get to grow in a climate controlled environment so we have long since discarded all that extra DNA which egg-layers have. We've evolved to survive better by getting SIMPLER - not more complex.
Most of the rest of your post is common and well debunked arguments. They are based on truth but the conclusions are false since they are massively oversimplified.
Here's a little example of such an oversimplification. Humans (and most other mammals) contain a protein called HSP-90. HSP-90 is one of those special proteines which fold other proteins into shape. It is very rigid, and will fold them into the "orthodox" shape EVEN IF the DNA has mutated, suppressing mutations from being realized into grown cells. Call it a checker for copying errors in DNA.
But HSP means "Heat Shock Proteine", HSP proteins are a family of proteins that the body uses in cases of sudden temperature change to help regulate our warm-blooded body temperatures. So if during early gestation there is a sudden temperature change- HSP gets diverted from folding proteins into it's "adult" job of regulating body temperature. Now the folding gets done by other folders - which lack it's rigidy and will simply do whatever the DNA says.
Look what's happening here - usually the body will suppress mutations, they could lie dormant for thousands of years without a single person born in which they have actually been realized, there's a sudden climate change - now the body stops suppressing, mutations galore get allowed to be realized into offspring. Evolution reached the point of doing it on-demand. When there is sudden climate change, it allows every mutation it has available to occur. This is beautiful. When things are stable - stick to what's working, when things change - the species tries everything. It uses every weird mutation it has to try and produce a version that may be suited to surviving in the new conditions.
One form of rapid speciation is triggered by HSP-90's effects. Of course MOST of those mutations die out, but if one is better suited to the sudden ice-age (or whatever) then it survives and breeds better- and once it goes to a second generation that DNA is now treated AS the orthodox, so it's not suppressed anymore. Voila - species change in a single generation. Using saved up mutations over thousands or even millions of years, that never ever showed up as organisms until the time when the world changed and sticking to "what always worked" is no longer a good idea.
>Charles became an atheist. I think it happened when one of his children died, but I could be wrong on that.
He died a troubled agnostic, but at the time when he was writing his grand works he was definitely a believer and in fact Origin of Species and Descent of Man both directly credit God for starting the process (multiple times). He actually held back on publishing Origin for nearly a decade because he feared that people could interpret it in ways that could harm his beloved church.
Everything you said about i
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Since I first heard Metallica's Kill 'Em All.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The only thing that worries me is if the "Intelligent Design" folks latch onto this. It seems like this guy is going to continue tweaking the experiment in hope of generating some self-replicating strain of his bubbles. (Heck, I would too.) But the ID crowd might see this as "proof" that life could only begin with "guidance" from above.
So what? They do that to anything whether it makes any sense or not. Digital cameras are as much "proof" that eyes can only be created by a "designer".
So what's the worry? That IDers will say "Ah ha!" and continue to think and say silly things? Oh noes! Science will as always press on without them.
The enemies of Democracy are
Maybe your problem is you had a bad biology teacher, because what you just wrote there would be rejected by every single biologist over the last 80 or 90 years. No one in the better part of a century has thought that evolution has a direction. Evolution, simply put, is the change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. It can lead to more complexity, the same level of complexity or less complexity. Features can evolve, can change, can even be lost and evolve again.
I'm standing by my other comments. You've shown sufficient ignorance of biology and evolution that I have to state quite openly that you have never ever ever ever ever ever read a book by biologists on evolution. Even reading one of the layman books like Dawkins' would have corrected you of the above error, probably in the first chapter of the The Blind Watchmaker.
With that in mind, I have to ask you, what makes you think you have any business lecturing anybody on a theory that you know absolutely nothing about? What made you so arrogant?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Years ago when I was hanging around talk.origins, I remember the famous observation that if radioactive decay happened at the levels YECs claimed, the Earth would be molten due to the sheer amount energy being released.
Decay rates are well understood, and providing a researcher understands what external factors can influence isotope decay rates (which physicists who measure decay rates for chronological purposes certainly can), it is a powerful tool for dating.
But as others observed, the first evidence that the Earth and life on it were much older than 6,000 years came in the 18th century, though back then they thought it was merely millions of years old, and it took the better part of a century to finally figure out that the Earth was billions of years old. Still, the fact remains that for well over two hundred years, scientists have known that the Earth is much much older than 6,000 years. Radiometric dating allowed us to accurately determine the ages of various geological features (including fossils), but it wasn't necessary for the initial determination that a literal reading of Genesis was pure crap.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laying_worker_bee
(yes, that study was a poor example...)
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
They're going to live off all those old incandescent light bulbs.