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NASA Ames Reproduces the Building Blocks of Life In Laboratory
hypnosec writes "Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center have reproduced non-biologically the three basic components of life found in both DNA and RNA — uracil, cytosine, and thymine. For their experiment scientists deposited an ice sample containing pyrimidine — a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen — on a cold substrate in a chamber with space-like conditions such as very high vacuum, extremely low temperatures, and irradiated the sample with high-energy ultraviolet photons from a hydrogen lamp. Researchers discovered that such an arrangement produces these essential ingredients of life. "We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, cytosine, and thymine, all three components of RNA and DNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space," said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. "We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate conditions in outer space, can make several fundamental building blocks used by living organisms on Earth."
SETI found nothing .. Maybe an alien civilization is in it's dark ages .. couple of hundred years away from inventing the radio.
Panspermia
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
I reproduced the building blocks of life in a laboratory once, it was awesome but kind of messy and awkward afterwards for a while but we got over it and now we are "just friends" I regret nothing. Now is the time to fight for COMMUNISM, the only road to womens liberation.
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
That is awesome. Scientist were trying to make those chemicals in conditions resembling primordial earth but it actually works in space. But...what how do you get the pyrimidine ? Can you make that in space from other more basic molecules and under what conditions?
A Highly Controlled Environment! Suggest lab really is "space-like"
What about the guanine and adenine?
If the nature of matter is to distribute itself so perfectly randomly that life can coexist, what better concept of God than a turn of events like that?
Soon to be producing the master race of American atomic super warriors. Support the Troops or die, scum!
They failed, however, to make the fourth basic ingredient for life... pizza.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Shouldn't it be called the Google Ames Research Center?
... the three basic components of life found in both DNA and RNA -- uracil, cytosine, and thymine.
The three components present in both DNA and RNA are cytosine, guanine and adenine. Uracil is only present in RNA, and thymine only in DNA.
What about guanine and adenine?
"the three basic components of life" is misleading, more like "three of the basic components of life"
Did they have Gil Gerrard ejaculate in it?
Bonus points if you get the reference.
Monstar L
Chemicals are not "life from lifelessness"
Until we can define WHAT (precisely) "life" IS (NOT a description of what life needs, or what it looks like, or what effects it has, but what it IS) a lot of these chemistry games that pretend to have some application to any questions about the origins of life are just bogus. This is an important distinction. We KNOW what other things ARE (electricity, for example, is the flow of electrons from one place to another) but there are at least two great mysteries we do not know (and often forget that we do not know): [1] what actually IS life? and [2] what actually IS gravity?. In both cases, we have lots of ideas and we have varying degrees of understanding of the EFFECTS of these things without knowing precisely what they ARE. Newton was brilliant for not getting distracted by trying to figure out gravity before trying to figure out how it acted, so we got the benefit of centuries of use of his gravitational equation - but we forget that he did not actually tell us what gravity IS.
*pop*
there goes another gap...
Uracil is a component of RNA, not DNA. Thymine is a component of DNA, not RNA (its made from Uralic by thyA and thyX). Cytosine is a component of both, DNA and RNA. But what about Adenine and Guanine? Looks like 3/5 component of nucleic acids.
I find the interesting part is "conditions found in space".
Because then life would likely not have been seeded on a some planet as a rare event. Rather, because the components could be be scattered all over, and life could develop all over the place, some planets may even have been successfully seeded repeatedly.
And there may well be extremophiles on Mars that are completely unrelated to life on Earth, as might well be on/in other planets and moons in our solar system.
Yes, and the LHC is nothing like the conditions immediately after the Big Bang. What's your point?
And we shouldn't make plans for tomorrow, because how can we even know there will be a tomorrow? After all, today and all days prior are not at all "tomorrow-like".
irradiated with high-energy ultraviolet photons
That's a part of "space-like conditions".
surrounded continuously by doting scientists and elaborate test apparatus
That part is to guarantee success and have a thorough measurement of the process. For the natural process, it is reasonable to assume that it took many hundreds of millions of years before some place (and maybe more than one, over those years) happened to have all those conditions in it at the same time. The point here is that all the things that they've done and all the input materials are the kind that occur naturally. From there it's all statistics.
What about guanine and adenine?
"the three basic components of life" is misleading, more like "three of the basic components of life"
The chief component is cytosine... cytosine and guanine. ...Our two chief components are cytosine and guanine...and adenine.... Our three components are cytosine, adenine and cuanine...and thymine.... Our four...no... amongst our components.... amongst our components...are such elements as cytosine, guanine.... I'll come in again.
Where was it discredited? There has been much revision of our knowledge of the early atmosphere, but his principles were sound. If you hate science that trys to find the origin of life, go back to church and pray to your diety of choice to prove otherwise. But pleas quit spewing outright lies. Most likely that is a sin in your belief system anyway.
Silence is a state of mime.
There have been countless experiments where you take some likely precursors and put them into an environment that is representative of somewhere, and lo and behold, you get complex organic compounds.
The classic one (and perhaps the original) is the Miler-Urey experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment, which was also featured in "the Amateur Scientist"
A mish mash of amino acids does not life make..
For instance we look which common properties two species have, and we calculate when the last common ancestor of those species must have lived, and then we go out and check mineral deposits of the approbriate age to look if we find fossils that are close to what we expect as the common ancestor.
The experiment was discredited by numerous researchers for (a) being a tautology and (b) excluding data that argued against its conclusions that spontaneous generation of life is indicated. It is tautological because Urey-Miller chose atmospheric composition that provided just the elements necessary to obtain amino acids when no empirical evidence of early atmosphere existed (nor exists today -- it's all conjecture until we perfect the time machine). It excluded contradictory data by ignoring the fact that the generated "precursors" required a tightly controlled environment and the intellect and technical skill of dedicated experts throughout the process.
Finally, the "precursors" themselves are such a minor part of the processes of life as to be inconsequential. It's like finding a sheen of dust on a rock and claiming that the Empire State Building arose spontaneously from just such dust, complete with working elevators and tenant invoicing.
There in no basis for assuming that these conditions would ever occur. It's not statistics, it's wishful thinking. But thanks for pointing out the reason abiogenesists demand an incalculable (and unreproducible) time span of billions of years for their theories to work. An interesting treatise on the mathematics of abiogenesis is atheist David Berlinski's talk "Problems with Evolution."
Because the logically equivalent Urey-Miller apparatus was discredited decades ago, so should this sideshow be.
Part of that was that some important chemicals were not created. The experiments were not the same.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
surrounded continuously by doting scientists and elaborate test apparatus
And if they weren't, you'd be bitching about lack of control, and/or contamination. That's seriously weak, man.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There in no basis for assuming that these conditions would ever occur. It's not statistics, it's wishful thinking. But thanks for pointing out the reason abiogenesists demand an incalculable (and unreproducible) time span of billions of years for their theories to work.
There is a whole lot better chance that those conditions could occur than any/all of the contradicting creation myths of every religion occurred, and you just so happened to be born into the one that is the real one, rather than all the wrong ones.
Don't you have some school board somewhere to infiltrate and force science students to learn creationism?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The experiment was discredited by numerous researchers for (a) being a tautology and (b) excluding data that argued against its conclusions that spontaneous generation of life is indicated.
Ah, the argument from personal incredulity. Okay, here we go. I simply cannot believe you
See how that works?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You can't do useful mathematics on abiogenesis unless you have defined a sequence of events.
claiming that the Empire State Building arose spontaneously from just such dust, complete with working elevators and tenant invoicing.
Ultimately, yes, early building blocks of life led to formation of the Empire State Building. Obviously, many billions of tiny intermediate steps were required. Which one of those tiny steps do you have problems with ?
Idiot.
I'll just leave this here: Ring Species
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
What's your stance on whether "any/all" of the historical mainline models of physics regarding... anything... happened?
Oh, that's right, that was an irrational word construction that couldn't happen for anything in any topic. It turns out that a particular physics model (or religion) may actually be right, and the others wrong, and their wrongness doesn't weight the right answer with newfound wrongness.
Who knew? It's not like you've had thorough evidence provided by basic reality of the irrationality of your stance provided directly to you every single day of your life, or something.
And then when going out you discover that in ~99% of the cases, there are no corresponding fossils findable for the required theoretical ancestor.
Or you save yourself the travel and ground-searching time by looking up this statistic as estimated by the most ardent evolutionary biologists and anthropologists.
Don't amplify this into some kind of "evolution doesn't happen" statement on my part. I'm merely stating your claim isn't nearly that simple. Scientifically.
What's your stance on whether "any/all" of the historical mainline models of physics regarding... anything... happened?
Oh, that's right, that was an irrational word construction that couldn't happen for anything in any topic.
Welcome back from the Iowa Freedom Summit, Mrs. Palin.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There in no basis for assuming that these conditions would ever occur.
You mean, except for the fact that we observe each of them occurring separately, and are not aware of any reason why having one occur would exclude the other? From those premises alone it follows that it is a statistic certainty that they will all occur at the same time eventually.
I think they forgot the whole gamma radiation bit. Last time I checked NASA said this is how they know they are not seeding mars with life because space radiation is so high energy that it sterilizes the entire spacecraft (Also a bit dubious but in space you will quickly get many many Sv of radiation which in a very short period of time is enough radiation to completely kill anything living or even organic in nature). So I'm not seeing how you get UV light into a very very thick lead alternating with a soft absorber and then more lead shielded ball needed to keep the organic chemicals from denaturing under even higher ionizing radiation exposure for millions of years. The probability you would get viable biological chemicals from space is zero. The longer your in space the more radiation you'll get. Only an atmosphere and magnetic field of a planet would provide enough shielding.
Who said anything about a creation myth? Only you. The validity of abiogenesis has nothing to do with any other theories, it either stands on its own evidence, or it doesn't. Given that there is zero evidence that billions of years accomplishes anything, this is what I would call a "hard vacuum" theory: it has no substance.
The steps that are problematic are the missing ones.
David Berlinski does some very useful math, and he doesn't need to know the sequence of events. He only needs to know that the proposed mechanism is beneficial mutations. His quite lucid illustration shows that the age of the univers is not remotely old enough to accomplish any constructive evolution, and that it's virtually impossible to make any forward progress with increasing complexity owing to the much higher probability of destructive mutations. This applies to chemical synthesis as well as to the never-observed increase in complexity of living things. All observed mutations create a less-complex outcome.
Nobody has observed these processes occurring naturally. Only with carefully crafted conditions and aparatus.
Nobody has observed high-energy ultraviolet photons naturally? Have you ever looked at the sun?
I hope nobody already posted this
http://xkcd.com/638/
"Life" is an actual thing (effect, energy, or whatever it is) that we observe and recognize. We comprehend a real difference between a person who is alive and that same person after he is dead - this is NOT some matter to be dispatched to the ivory towers of philosophers who write enourmous literary tomes of the imagination and ask questions about trees falling in the absence of listeners.
Human beings have long performed more-or-less (usually less) medical/scientific tests for the presence of life (ranging from a heaving chest or a fogged mirror to a pulse or data from an EEG) which is somethig we generally do not do for fuzzy philosophical questions. Yes, it's generally far easier to take difficult questions whose answers might be difficult to obtain and might not be to our liking and shove them into the field of philosophy (where most of us can then happily ignore them) but that does not in fact make them just "pholosophical questions"
As for a few chemicals being the "building blocks of life", I guess I just always feel compelled to laugh. A few chemicals that are USED by life are not necessarily "building blocks". I use gasoline to power my car, but I do not refer to the chemicals in the gas as "building blocks" of my car or of transportation. The car is constructed from many materials like steel, glass, plastic, copper, fabric, rubber, and paint - but I do not label these thins as "building blocks" of cars or transport. That phrase "building blocks of life" has been around for a long time as a rather poor literary crutch some scientists originally used to explain their ideas to the general public. The phrase carries with it the implied (but completely unsubstantiated) implication that if you just bring the right blocks together and arrange them the right way POOF life will arise, which is a HUGE assumption when one does not even know what life IS. We know what fire IS, we know what heat IS, we know what electricity IS, but we do not know what life IS; we mostly just describe what it does, or what it needs, etc. It's a bit of an intellectual trap to turn that "building blocks" phrase (which was intended as a simplification for laymen) around and get confused into studying the materials and assuming that detecting them or making them has anything to do with creating life.
By what possible 20th (or 21st) century definition of "life" have we "already created life"?????
Genetic manipulations while possibly a wonderful innovation that might lead to better drugs, far fewer medical problems, etc in the future are still just manipulations of life that already exists. Manipulations of the genetic material (that life will then process and use) is NOT the same thing as creating the life that uses that genetic material.
Has there been some bizzare Frankenstein experiment with Jacob's Ladders, bubbling liquids in tubes, lightning, and stitched-together corpses that I missed? (even THAT old story used pre-existing elements that were previously alive)