Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Mystery
derekmead writes "Scientists have had a basic understanding of how life first popped up on Earth for a while. The so-called 'primordial soup' was sitting around, stagnant but containing the basic building blocks of life. Then something happened and we ended up with life. It's that 'something' that has been the sticking point for scientists, but new research from a team of scientists at the University of Leeds has started to shed light on the mystery, explaining just how objects from space might have kindled the reaction that sparked life on Earth. It's generally accepted that space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth. Meteorites bombarding the planet early in its history delivered some of the necessary materials for life but none brought life as we know it. How inanimate rocks transformed into the building blocks of life has been a mystery. But this latest research suggests an answer. If meteorites containing phosphorus landed in the hot, acidic pools that surrounded young volcanoes on the early Earth, there could have been a reaction that produced a chemical similar one that's found in all living cells and is vital in producing the energy that makes something alive."
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria...
That's the impression you'd get from skimming the headlines. I fear it's a bit sensationalist.
The experiment you refer to involved a synthesized -copy- of an existing organism's genome. An impressive feat, but not quite "creating life in any form we wish."
We've learned to copy-and-paste DNA. Right now that's about all we can do. Protein-folding is a hard problem, so we can't easily predict what a given DNA sequence will do, let alone invent new sequences. We can do a bit of remixing, copying a gene from here to there, but we can't create new genes yet.
We'll get there, I don't doubt that. But at this stage, our "synthetic genome" is just a xerox copy.
Informative link about the "synthetic genome" experiment: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/%20projects/synthetic-bacterial-genome/press-release/