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Scientists Poised to Create Life
Tim C writes "I was watching the 9 o'clock News on BBC1 here in the UK, and could hardly believe what I was seeing - a group of American scientists have apparently discovered what they believe to be the 300 or so genes that are all that is required to create a simple life-form - more details can be found on the BBC news website.
Somewhat reassuringly, they realise the potential impact of their work, and so are seeking the opinions of religious leaders before proceeding with the next stage of their research - actually attempting to create a living organism."
Just one week?
/. population is astounding. That one person can say, in the middle of this crowd, that 'man may make the vessel, but the soul of God's work', without rabid retribution from the rest - who've been born and raised on stories of aliens and AI... Wow!
Seven days?
Interesting. Did he rest on the seventh?
This is a truly amazing, fascinating topic. The scope of reactions across the
Maybe we are ready for this after all.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
"Nature" apparently allows us to do this too. If it defied physical law, the "laws of nature," well, it just wouldn't work now would it? I've never understood why anything we do is not "natural," but anything any other species does is. People who think like this tend to also say that we are no better than any other thing on earth. If we are no better, then wouldn't whatever we do be "natural" as well??? If what we do is unnatural, you are admitting that there is something that sets us apart from nature. Setting us apart in a dominant way. If that is the case, then we are in fact better. So either way, we should do whatever we want as a species.
If we wanna save the environment, well, that is for us. Not for the spotted owls. If we think it's actually for some dumb birds, we're deluding ourselves.
Fox' experiment produced not only amino acids, but simple proteins and basic cellular structures. That's right -- cells. Were they alive? Who knows. But I've done the experiment myself, in his lab, with his help, and it's dirt easy, and it produces great results.
He called the cells "proteinoid microspheres", and they followed some parameters for living things -- metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, etc. That might or might not mean anything -- fire has the same properties after all -- but it certainly felt like Fox was on the right track. So much so in fact that he had the opportunity to present his results before the Pope on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, Dr Fox died a couple of years ago and no one ever really learned about his work. Too bad.
For more on Dr Fox, take a look here (an article) and here (a thumbnail biography).
Anyhow, the point of bringing all this up is that this research really isn't anything new -- just the synthesis of several modern trends that would have happened sooner or later regardless, like cloning.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I read somewhere once, that a group of scientists had built a tank of gasses that were similar to earth when life supposedly evolved.. according to darwin's notes.. and they did get amino acids to form.. it was interesting, but I probably got the details somewhat wrong since I think it's been 6 years since I read it.. does anyone know what it is i'm referring to? who did it, where it was done?
You are refering to Stanley Miller's experiment where he tried to create the compounds found in living things from a mixture of gases hypothesized to approximate conditions on Earth way back when.
I am quite sure that Miller was not working from Darwin's notes, however. The mixture of gases Miller used came from much more modern sources.
BTW, Miller was mildly sucessful, creating several interesting things in his apparatus. However these compunds were still far to simple and lacked the stereochemical chemical properties found in living things.
...something
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'm sorry, I realize none of you want to hear again the whole "playing god" thing, but I really think this has gone too far. Who does man think he is, to assume the role of god and create life? Are we really that conceited that we feel we are ALLOWED to create other organisms? I wasn't even thrilled when we began cloning other species, though at least we weren't starting with a lab table and ending up with a brand new organism.
I don't want to get off topic, but...man continues to disgust me. Too often we think that WE are the dominant species, the ones meant to survive. We are arrogant, and we are ignorant. Every day we cut down tons of trees for wood in order to keep industry alive. When will we realize that these very trees are what supply us with oxygen? And who gave us the job of ruining the habitats and lives of other organisms...why, just because we have more brainpower than them? People often say we're the smartest of species, but I disagree. For, if we truly were, we wouldn't be the only species on earth who kills its own for pleasure.
And now this. And now, we synthesize life, just another step in man's arrogant trip to the top. This comes at a time when we are trying to learn more about other plants, of which Mars comes to mind at the moment. The first thing we did when we found out we could get to Mars was send out probes to check if there was water there, and analyze the atmosphere -- why? Sure there were some minor scientific reasons: life on mars? history of mars? But the real reason - can it support human life? Once again, we are putting ourselves first, not worrying about how we will ruin Mars as we did Earth, and trying to extend our boundaries and God-given limitations.
Folks, I am not an overly religious person. But this has got to stop.
When will the realization that we are not the be-all end-all species set in, and finally limit our scientific expeditions?
Science can take us anywhere; it's time for us to set the limits on how far we'll let it take us.
---Blake
SO, if the scientists succeed, they by definition become GOD, correct? Can they put that after their names like MD or PhD?
seriously, though. It's just a matter of time. If someone can almost do this today, then imagine what types of life they'll be creating when they have a 1000 node cluster of 10ghz cpu machines helping to do the computation (say in 10 years)
sometime in the future, it might be a grad student exercise to synthesize an organism based on stereoisomers of amino acids.
Read K. Eric Drexlers book - Engines of Creation
Religion isn't going to like this, but then traditional religions generally don't seem as relavent to 20th century folk as they might have hundreds of years ago. Most people don't really like the idea of appending a religious text the way we'd append a constitution or law, either, so traditional religions can't very well deal with things like genetic engineering that didn't exist until a few decades ago. They have to rely on some subjective interpretation...
Not a troll about religion. Just my opinion. If you love god, that's great, but if you feel like religion doesn't speak to you concerns, read the first few chapters of The Celestine Prophecy and see if you agree (good book, but it lost me towards the end)
So, religion aside, the real issue is: who's going to fund creation of new life? My guess is that the US won't support it for political reasons, but that some 3rd world country will. Same with genetic engineering - you know that eventually somebody is going to start cloning humans.... and people *will* pay money (hey perverts: want a 21-year old Pamela Andersen clone? How about a clone of famous dead people? How about cloning sports stars and genetically enhancing them to have more mass, muscle, how about genetically enhanced wrestlers? is there any money in any of these?)
So, a few top scientists will disappear from the face of the earth, and then one day... BOOM! some earth-shattering announcements about new synthesized life forms.
You know that every country has probably discussed the idea of GENETIC WARFARE (it is, of course, an extension of biological warfare which every country has done extensive research in)
... and wouldn't oil companies like to develop oil-eating phages to clean up after their alcoholic ship captains when they crash tankers?
... and wouldn't the seed companies like to have seed that would grow in broader climate ranges and bear larger fruit and be STERILE so that you had to buy more seed (oh, wait, we're already doing that)
... and wouldn't livestock growers like to ensure that their cows gave more milk and that their turkeys had larger breasts (oh, wait, we're already doing that).. how about if we could grow just a chicken breast with no head or feathers?
... and wouldn't parents like to ensure that their offspring were disease and genetic defect free? we can test for stuff today, but imagine if you could go through a menu much the way you configure a linux kernel and add and subtract genes from a lifeform you create?
Face it , after the web,e-commerce, internet thingy become commonplace, the next big boom will be in biotech again, and it will possibly *NOT* happen in the US.
Hold on for a wild ride!
I believe in God, and I don't really think
that we should create life.
Why not?
On what do you base this judgement?
Where is it written that we should not create life?
It's the same old story time and time again.
Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to study the heavens.
Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to use glasses that lie (telescopes and microscopes).
Once, our religious leaders told us that it is not our place to dissect human beings.
Once, our religious leaders told us that it was not our place to go to the southern hemisphere, where great beasts and antipodes lived.
And so here we go for another spin... Sad, really.
Everyone has a unique perspective, and it's entirely possible that everyone's perspective has a part of the truth. It's like the story of the blind men and the elephant.
Then, of course, you can always give J.R.R. Tolkein's famous reply to this conundrum, which he put in his poem "Philomyth to Mysomyth". This argument comes from the basis that if we're made in God's image, and God is a Creator, then we must also be creators. (Indeed, by this argument, to be otherwise would be to destroy our very essence.)
Last, but not least, there's the argument that God (whoever/whatever God may be) gave everyone free will. To renounce that gift is clearly something you can do, but since it goes against what God obviously wanted us to have, it's at best stupid and at worst a crime against nature.
Oh, and as for sailing around the planet, one of the earliest to do so, Saint Brenden the Navigator, did so on (so he claimed) God's orders. So, if more people had consulted religion back then, America might have been discovered a thousand years earlier. Religion is what you make of it, not the other way round.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They simulated the conditions of preprehistoric earth... volcanoes... lightning... they created a bacteria that would absorb "food" but it would not procreate. So by the definition of life it was not alive.
There were no volcanoes in Miller's experiment, only electric arcs (lightning).
He most certainly did not create a bacteria!
And as for this alledged bacteria, what "definition of life" are you applying. While I agree that a creature such as you describe is not alive, I am amazed at how you banty about the phrase "definition of life", like we have this all figured out already.
It is uninformed, incorrect posts such as these that threaten to make the internet practically useless as a learning tool. I can only pity the poor student who searches for information about this article and ends up reading this mostly ignorant discussion.
Hmmm...that was a little harsh, but i just don't see why people bother posting if they know nothing about what they are talking about.
Okay, i'll stop now, really.
The boundary between this and creating life from dust is a bit different. But is it really that different -- we simply do not know whether the life we create will be good or bad. We knowingly spawn all sorts of life we deem "bad". What we do not know is whether creating life will be good or bad life until after the fact. But we do know that we will learn from it, good or bad. That might be a bad thing, as all kinds of "evils" may spawn from synthetic life.
But my guess is that the good intentions of the many will overcome the many possible bad outcomes. Who are we to say what is good and bad? We appear to have been rewarded for the search of truth and knowledge, the exploration and exploitation of lands and resources. Or so we think. Some lessons are only possible by nature's trials.
I think, and I might be very wrong about this, but I think that this sort of life will be created, approval of common ethics or not.
I don't know why they want to talk to religious groups, first off. That smells like a grab for some airtime and cheap publicity - Once you concider some of the impacts that this technology can have. From a step back, the only thing I've seen come out of religion recently is a lot of people killing each other and crazies annoying me at my front door in the morning.
Flamebait aside - here's why this is really important. My dad is a PhD Genetist, and has talked about one of the problems with biology for the longest time. Basically it comes down to this - biologists aren't too concerned with how things work, why they work, and how to use them.
One of his favorite stories goes like this - an alien biologist and an alien engineer land on Earth. They see a 2 TV sets, and don't know what they are. The biologist promptly gets his tools, microscope, sketchbook, and disscects the TV, counting and drawing each part, right down to the microscopic level. What does the engineer do? Hits the "power" button. :)
Once we can engineer life, we can make use of the only known self-replicating, self-assembling, kick-entropy-in-the-face system in the universe! The applications are endless, here's a few:
Want to colonize mars? Make a bacterium that feeds on mineral deposits and CO2 to generate massive amounts of Oxygen. Worred about infection and lifespan? An adquate understanding of the genes will allow you to program it to replicate 10 times, and then die - just like your cells die.
Need clean power? The article hit the nail on the head. PLANTS split water up into hydrogen and oxygen - albeit in small amounts - and there isn't a soul on the planet that can duplicate that system. My dad would get a kick out of biology texts, because they have the engineering equivilant of a "and then a miracle happens" block on their photosynthesis charts. This alone has the potential to revolutionalize every aspect of our lives!
Obviously there are dangers, but we're a species that lives with between 20k and 50k thermonuclear warheads turned on and able to extinct the planet with the confirmation of a code and the press of a button.
Quantifying life in chemical terms will open up a new science, breathe new life into biotech, maybe put an end to some of this religious crazieness, and most of all - get engineers working with biological systems, the most elegant computer system of all. Whoever made that analogy in an above post was a genius!
Kudos!
..don't panic
The problem with creating a new lifeform (and a tiny bacterium will probably be first since it's simplest) is that NO ONE can know for sure that the created life form won't be worse than than anthrax or E. Coli (sp?) and deadly to all life forms.... It matters not who they ask. Religious leaders don't have specialized access to Ultimate Truth. They're just people like you and me, as are the scientists. But someone, somewhere will try to create the life form sooner or later, so it would be better to do it now under rigorously controlled conditions than for some overzealous grad student at an ivy league school to kill off most of the east coast (though I suppose we could stand to do without New Jersey) for his thesis project. So I say, yes, do it, so we know how to deal with it if someone else does it too.
What is the connection between "creating life" and "playing god"?
Good question. I think the answer to that question is another question: Why do we want to create life? I think every scientist involved ought to ask him/herself that question.
Of course, I also think that scientists should be required to study philosopy before they can get their PhDs. =)
As I understand them, the commandments need some common sense applied to them in order to mean anything. For instance, 'shalt not kill' must mean 'shalt not kill any humans', as it is clear that killing plants and animals for food is okay.
Certainly. Of course, they also need some context applied to them. To comment on the example you gave: some translations (King James, RSV, a couple others) use the word "kill." Others use the word "murder." If you go back to the original Hebrew, you will find that it was closer to "murder".
You can play God all you want thinking that you can create life.
Since when is thinking that you can create life == playing God? People have been accused of "playing God" long before biotechnology. Frinstance when they determine who shall live and who shall die, as in executions and triage wards. It's a trendy phrase, used to dis those who make unpopular decisions about life and death.
But you will NEVER BE God.
That depends on your definition of God. In the JudeoChristian tradition, it's true. Humans can never be God, because there can be only one God, and that job's taken. The best we can hope for is to be with God someday.
But there are other approaches to consider. In some traditions, humans are already Gods, or at the very least carry a part of the divine within them. Still others claim that some humans are Gods (f'rinstance the king, the emperor, etc.) but most are not and can never be. Who's right? I've got my own beliefs, but I can't say that I know.
It's yet another waste of your tax dollars.
That does not follow from your initial argument. If you think it's a waste of tax dollars, please tell why. Offer some reason. If it's only because we won't become Gods as a result, then all spending is a waste of money. You can't buy Godliness, at least not in any religion that I'm aware of.
Ok so this comment started out as a reply, but turned into something else when I noticed that the article does not actually say anything about religous leaders, or asking there opinion. It states the following "The idea is currently the subject of an ethical review "
So it's a question of Ethics, not Religion. Some may argue that the two are intertwined. For all we know they submitted it to a panel of their scientific peers.
It seems more likely that they recognize that what they are trying to do effects the future of all humanity:
"...the scientists involved say no
attempt will be made to proceed with the daring
experiment until there has been a full and public
debate."
and respect the fact that maybe it should be humanity's decision, not thiers.
The article states that there may be some debate on the subject that has religous overtones:
"The prospect of "scientists playing God", as
some will undoubtedly see it, is bound to
provoke some fierce arguments. "
But all that says is someone somewhere might do some bible thumping.
note that the majority of humanity is religous, therefore if the decision is made by humanity, it may end up being decided on religous grounds.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
Scientists don't really have any training based on morailty. Generally they do what they do for science sake. We don't have many conservative leaders, by conservative I mean asking what affect this technology will have 10 generations from now. You can't exactly extrapolate out that far, but I think you know what i mean. People who might have insights in this area are probably religious leaders and philosophers.
If they actually have the ability to create even the most basic life forms, this is INCREDIBLY huge with ramifications beyond anything I can image. It won't be long before we can create complex organisms if this turns out to be true. Look at how quickly computers developed over the past 50 years. Amazing.
Our society has no mechanisms (institutions) to handle something like this. It's more like "if it makes money, go for it". Of course we do have laws limiting some harmful activities, but the church is the closest thing we have to a "moral" institution, regardless of what you think of them.
They should be consulting philosophers as well as a number of religious leaders. IMO, our society isn't ready for this, just like we aren't ready for genetic engineering. Given how our society acts twords most of it's population, the ability to do harm is too high.
Religious leaders would probably be against it, but they would probably also so that this isn't creating life. You can't "manufacture" a soul would probably be their argument.
I think that the ethical implications of this are enormous, and reach beyond the Judeo-Christian boundries that you think this is pushing. Note that the researchers only said "consult with religious leaders," without specification as to type.
There are those who think that ethics and religion don't go hand in hand. I disagree. That thing that Judeo-Christians like to call a consience is what drives us to a standard for ethics. The idea that an religious life is an ethical life is part of our core beliefs.
This is quite important, as you noted "We never stopped to think if we should." I must commend them for taking this step.
As a firm (but not rigid, for those that might call me intolerant) believer in God, I am impressed that in these times that the team even felt it was necessary to ask this question. Many posters here on /. seem to think that infomation is for information's sake alone, that ethics and religion have nothing to do with answers.
Do I think science should not be looking for this answer? No. Through science, we learn the mind of God. Perhaps in time, science can create life. But science can NEVER make something out of nothing. Only God can. So I don't feel that the creation of life belongs to God, per se. The soul, that belongs to God. Science may create the vessel, but never the essence.
For those of you who don't share my beliefs, that's fine. This is just my point of view. You're entitled to your own, just as I am.
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
What Frankenstein failed to do had nothing to do with control and everything to do with responsibility for the consequences of his actions. He was afraid and disgusted by what he had created, and so he ran off.
Yes, that's right -- Victor Frankenstein was a deadbeat dad.
So the question for the TIGR researchers is this: What are the consequences and risks of creating life at this level? Clearly, a baby mycobacterium is not going to require a daddy in order to grow up to be a socially well-adjusted mycobacterium, so Herrdoktorprofessor Frankenstein's particular act of irresponsibility is irrelevant here. It seems to me that the worst risk is that the newly-engineered bacterium might either be infectious and deleterious itself, or else that it might mutate into something dangerous.
What precautions are being taken against this risk? I would hope that they are conducting their experiments in clean-room environments and taking all reasonable steps to ensure that their engineered microbes do not escape. They should make sure that if they give their little baby bacteria to anyone else, that the recipient also knows how to care for them (i.e. how to contain them). Furthermore, they should have a means of reliably killing the bacteria when they're done with them, to make sure they do not spread into the wild.
Join with me in our prayer
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CmdrTaco be thy name
Give us this day our daily news
Forgive us our flames and bad Karma
As we forgive those who flame against us
Your website come
Thy posting be done
In the real world as it is online
- Different perspective. It's always nice to get a different POV than yours, if only to make you stop and think.
- Gauge possible reaction from public. Who would have a better idea of what John Q. Public might think, the scientists or the clergy?
- Never underestimate the power of good PR.
I could go on, but the question I would ask is, why not?P.S. I'm a devout agnostic.
Do we have that right to kill it? Is that murder? If we mess up somehow, do we have a new species, and then are we allowed to cause it's extinction?
This brings back memories of Asimov's robot books, actually. We create the 'life-form', and then we're not legally allowed to kill it (except these life-forms can actually kill it).
ps. I'm all for it.
trying to learn, and unlock the secrets of life is *not* playing God
I forget who said it (I'm thinking St. Augustine), but one of my favourite quotes is "Let know man think he can know too much about the Book of God's Words or the Book of God's Works."
"The Book of God's Words" is, of course, referring to the Bible.
"The Book of God's Works" is referring to the natural world.
In other words, this is a theologian saying that science (the study of the natural world) is not only ok, but that it is glorifying to God.
Of course, if you listen to many of the posters here, rather than to history, you would find this hard to believe.
Boy, am I tired of the unfounded centrality the genome has in the public consciousness. Even most scientists, who should know better, talk as if the genome is the only essential component of life.
"Technically we would need to synthesise a genome and see if it led to a living organism."
Uh, a genome on its own, synthesized or not, will never lead to a living organism! It requires extremely complicated biological machinery to transcribe, process, and then translate the DNA into proteins. This is not a trivial matter. For all our advances in the field of cloning, for example, we still have to stick our manipulated DNA into a naturally produced egg. DNA is a very simple molecule; the rest of the fertilized egg is not be so easy to synthesize.
Being able to build DNA is great, but DNA on its own does nothing! Only when you have DNA wrapped in an elaborate package do you have the possibility of life. Focusing only on the DNA is like believing that once you have a blueprint, you don't need to know anything about tools to build a house.
I'm going to go off the deep end and propose an ethical rational behind this creating life thing. Somebody's got to do it, so that the experiment can be done right, and we slashdotters have the tenacity to take the initiative, no? What it boils down to, of course, is if the public is ready for it. I'll expound on that after my rational.
Athiestic Ethical Rational Number FtW001Under a sufficiently controlled environment this experiment can be done safely and ethically. First off, comparison to Jurassic Park is a good warning but scale is an issue. It is conceivable to build a sealed, starile room in which the experiment can be carried out and terminated. Such rooms already exist and harbor such dangerous organisms as Bochelism, HIV, and Anthrax. We are thus already prapared to handle the experiment with relative safety.
If we create it, we can destroy it. This is what should be done. Until we have examined all of the ethical ramifications of exposing the outside world to our creation, we should not let it leave this room. We destroy living creatures in the name of science all the time, particularly micro-organisms. This would be nothing new.
Since we cannot begin to comprehend the uses of this technology until we try it, we should try it in a controlled situation. As each use is discovered, we should have an intelligent and responsible group of people examine its ethics. Only by doing this step by step can we be prepared to deal with some rogue lab going out on its own and doing ethically questionable things.
The key is that now that the technology is at hand, ignorence is more dangerous than striking out on shaky ground. If we balk at this, somebody is going to do something that we don't understand and hurt somebody before we can say "now wait a minute!"
Obvously, my arguments are founded on certain fundemental assumptions, such as that what we are currently doing is ethical to begin with. If you disagree with these, than you can't argue the details, just come up with your own rational. My point is that we should be hashing out rationals left and right, right?
Now, that said, the real obstacle here is public opinion. By that, I don't mean Joe Sixpack exactly. I'm refering to the religious leaders that the scientists are consulting, and politicians, and corperations, and anybody and everybody who acts as a spokesperson or leader of the public. If the majority of these people are not ready for this technology, and by ready I mean a variety of things, then the experimentors are going to run into a world of trouble.
I'm sure you can imagine what I'm talking about. If the scientists went ahead without consulting everybody, you'd have religious terrorists bombing the labs (as other /.ers have suggested), you'd have corperations patenting the procedure and using it to create the ultimate protein food or the ultimate weapon, and you'd have government agents snatching key information from the lab databases, or whatever government agents really do, and you'd have more people voting for the candidate who wants to cut back on science.
And that's my pair of coppers
-- "So far, I have not found the science" -Soul Coughing
Genes do not an organism make. The most apt analogy is that the genes are all the code for an OS. For a functioning OS, the code itself is necessary but not sufficient. For that we need hardware to execute the code. In the case of the cell the hardware is not specified entirely by the genes - some of it is in fact inherited from previous generations of the organism but not in the form of DNA. As an example, one of the most important of these is the membrane that contains the cell. There are no "genes" for the membrane, yet it does not form on its own - it is entirely derived from previous membranes. The energy that most cells use largely comes from an electric and chemical potential across this membrane - without it there is no "life", there is just a collection of genes. The key concept here is continuity of life through evolution from time imemorial to the present day.
Suppose we start with a huge OS full of extraneous and useless things. We widdle the code down so that eventually we have a "minimal OS". Does that mean we created something new? Certainly not. When these people delete all the "extra" genes, they would certainly not have created a new life form - they would have modified an existing organism - something that is done countless times on a daily basis with experimental organisms.
Now if we start from an artificial membrane "sack", squirt into it the machinery needed to transcribe DNA and produce proteins, put in some DNA, zap it to establish an electrical gradient then watch it grow and divide, then we would have really done something. The size of the DNA and the number of genes is not so important - we can easily manipulate DNA with ten times that number of genes.
So what have these people done then? Well a mildly interesting intellectual excercise and a nice story for the BBC. The greatest impact of this story will be the cries of outrage by the misinformed, and the un-needed (and undeserved) bad publicity for all scientists.
Of course I see differences, but not neccessarily ones that neccesitate getting the blessing of the Pope or any other religious leader.
Personally I disagree strongly with a lot of current religious opinion on the standard method for creating life.
As for whether we are wise enough to know when we should go about any scientific endeavour, my own view of history shows me that if left up to the church, the answer will always be "Not yet", because scientific advancement always seems to come at the cost of religious dogma, so the church never looks favorably on it.
Who then is to decide when we are wise enough? If not god, or its supposedly appointed diplomats here on earth, then ultimately the choice cannot but be left up to the people who have the capability to make any advancement.
Personally I think the willingness on the part of the scientists to open the debate shows tremendous wisdom in and of itself. I just think its too bad that somebody apparently things religious leaders are synonymous with moral or ethical leaders.
On the subject of hindsight, I'd be interested in where in history you think that it might have been better to have waited. Personally I see tragedies where science was held back far too long. At technologies current pace, people born a few generations from now might need never die. Had the church not held back science in so many ways for so long, we might be that immortal generation.
Also on the subject of hindsight, one must realize that we of this world are not all of one mind. As such, just because one group of scientists decide not to pursue a particular path of knowledge doesn't mean it won't be pursued. And on the principle of the enemy you know versus the enemy you don't I'd rather see these scientists do it than a team in a biowarfare lab that I won't see. Perhaps that latter team has already followed this path and created a deadly bio-weapon that can kill anyone, say all the clearly inhuman monsters walking among us with brown eyes. Our best defense to the release of such a weapon would be the open and disseminated knowledge of how one might make a custom virus to combat the weapon. That is, perhaps to have followed the path of knowledge in the open.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
And to the person who claims that this is just a dialog and not approval, you are very naive.
First, science has a built in peer review process. To open this issue up to public debate is wrong. Science has its own built-in procedures to decide these issues. This discussion must take place considering normal scientific methods and within the already established scientific forums.
Second, public opinion based on ignorance is utterly worthless. Far too many people base their opinions on sensationalized news stories and wacko religious nuts. For the most part, these people know nothing of the methodologies and theories on which science is based. People believe weird things for weird reasons and are uniquely unqualified to objectively evaluate cutting edge science.
Finally, this is not a religious issue. To the extent that mankind can create life using their own knowledge and technology is the extent to which that creation is not a concern of religion. I'm sure this won't stop the loony religionists from chiming in with their opinions. This is not elitism because anybody in the world is free to know the science and join the debate within the standard forums.
Judgment should not come from the public or theologians, but from fellow scientists who are much more likely to comprehend the true value and risks of the work. This is why established scientific procedures should be followed in this matter. To do otherwise is to stand the scientific method on its ear. How many people think that Linus should allow Jerry Falwell to judge his work on the Linux kernel? The principles are the same.
You're not thinking straight. In a tiny colony of a million bacteria who undergo fission about once every hour, a mutation affects only one of them. If the worst comes to the worst, it dies. The other 999,999 go on to become 1,999,998 within the next hour. If the food supply is limited, many individual bacteria may mutate themselves to death without affecting the climax population size or even substantially impacting the time taken to get there. So mutations even in vital genes are not really a problem.
And of course mutations in "junk" DNA are of neutral value to the organism.
Organisms which have a short life cycle are designed to cope very well with a high proportion of deleterious mutations, because the losers are quickly replaced. And some mutations which are deleterious under normal circumstances are advantageous in others, so today's weakly mutant is tomorrow's lucky survivor with all the food to himself.
Thus the net value to a bacterium of mutation in vital genes is probably positive.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
To summarize:
1929: theory that early atmosphere had no oxygen
1952: theory refined to postulate components of early earth (stellar byproducts, mostly)
1953: Stanley Miller reproduced those initial conditions in a container, threw in some boiling water and zapped it with a million volts. After a one weeks, he had a bunch of different amino acids.
Does anybody else find it weird that science has to basically ask religion if its ok to do something? Is that the right path? Is an answer of "Only God should create living things" an acceptable scientific argument?
I do not believe in the same God that the world's religious leaders believe in. Therefore is it right to deprive me of this scientific advance?
Now, I'm not arguing that we should just run right out and do it. Like I said at the top, "whether we should" is indeed a valid question. I just find it weird to think of science as asking religion, as if they are the ones that should be consulted. If we'd done that 300+ years ago would anybody have bothered to try sailing around the planet?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Umm... well, first of all, religious != nut despite what the media may say (but we know they are ALWAYS correct, right?) If you apply the same ignorant stereotype, then every Arab is a terrorist, all policemen constantly exercise brutality, , etc, etc.
The point however is not that they are asking religious leaders what they think per se, but for once getting a little bit of public debate on an issue before advancing farther in an area of science that the majority of the people in the world will never really understand. Don't get me wrong, Im all for scientific advancement and discovery. All too often, and especially these days, research seems to barrel headlong down the road with no heed of future consequences. Where was it said, maybe star trek, that the one of the most dangerous things is someone who has some technology or knowledge that is beyond their understanding.
I don't have a problem with microbes to break down sewage or that will eliminate landfills, or break hydrogen out of water for fuel. What I do worry about are designer bacteria for infecting people, or something that starts out well meaning (maybe that sewage bacteria mutates into the a modern black death). Once these designer organisms get out, and you know they will, these are the same corporations, after all, that dump their toxic waste into our water supply; thats it, you can't get them back, and you can't control what they will do. It is a Pandora's, and science opens them often enough without any sort of debate, leaving everyone else with the concequences, for better or worse. It is great that we are discovering these things. But we need to think not just about what this or other discoveries will do for the present, but how it may affect people generations from now. As wonderful as it is, I applaud them for realizing that science is not the only thing in the world that matters.
Nose
Nose -Common Sense isn't.
It may be possible to engineer an organism with this 'core' set of genes, to see if it is correct, and to work iteratively to a confirmed 'core' set of genes. I wouldn't call this 'creating' life, it's really modifying an existing organism, similar to what is done regularly by molecular biologists, but with a new goal. It will help understanding of existing organisms, but isn't anywhere close to making a 'new' form of life.
Jim Lund
I remmember reading this article in discover a while back about someone creating a metabolism in the lab. Weird wild stuff!
Personally I don't think this is a matter of religious morality. We should use those same minds that can create life in a lab to ask ourselves, "is this a good idea?", or, "So what are we going to do with this life in a petrie dish anyhow?"
The problem is that we have this belief that creating technology without contemplating its implications for our society is okay. The mere act of inventing something implies it eventual usage, and so we must decide whether it is worth going down that road. Frankly I don't think God cares if we create life or invent nuclear weapons. I think we should however!
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
http://sciences.homepage.com/miller. html
Enjoy!
This may be the most interesting thing to happen in science since that apple caught Newton's attention. The only problem I can see is that the form of the "new" life will be so closely allied with the genetic structure of the experimental model that there may be some potential for crossover contamination. And, since the source organism lives in every human body, that constitutes a real turn of the roulette wheel. Which, I suppose, is why it SHOULD happen now, and with the strictest protocols under very bright lights.
As to the religious objections -- if there is a god (of any ilk), she put the possibility of this experiment into the original programming. We're just making it open source.
A Genetic Engineer dies and goes to heaven to meet God. .. no . .get your own dirt.
Genetic Engineer So tell me God, what does a guy have to do to run this place?
GOD Can you create life?
Genetic EngineerYes!, I can, can you?
GodWith that God picks up a pile of dirt and with a little of this and a little of that....presto!..creates life!
Genetic Engineer Not to be out done, the GE bends over to pick up some dirt and god stops him and says:
God no
A few years ago, sitting in bio class, I started thinking to myself: an organism is just a giant computer, right? The DNA is the source code, transcription into polypeptide chains is compiling (assembling, really), protein folding is linking, and then the exe's (proteins, enzymes) run on the platform of cytoplasm. This anology can be extended further quite easily. Membrane-embedded receptor proteins are input, the golgi apparatus is output, the nervous system is the central bus, etc.
So, being a programmer, I wondered how hard it would be to "write" an organism from scratch, in assembly language (amino acid sequence). We'd have to understand all the layers above it, including transcription (we understand that pretty well) and protein folding (that one will take a lot of work still). Not to mention how tertiary/quaternary structure of proteins affects their function (a veeeery hard question, as of now). I thought that writing an original organism would be out of reach for at least 50, if not several hundred years.
What it looks like is that these scientists are not using assembly language, they're using pre-build [COM/CORBA/whatever] components. In fact, biology makes it much easier than would be expected: we don't even have to understand the precise functions and interactions (component interfaces) of each component. We just throw them all in a cell and let them mingle how they like, and it works! I never considered that in my bio class musings.
However, this still makes an interesting point: until we "write" the organism in DNA base sequences (machine language) or perhaps amino acid sequence (assembly language), we cannot say that this is an "original" organism, created by man. It's more like a microscopic Frankenstein, that is, built from pieces of other organisms.
Clue Flash! Any sufficiently mature man and woman can create life. The big difference here is that team of scientists might actually have a better understanding of the ramifications of their actions that say your average inner city teenage mother.
How far exactly do you want technology and science to push ahead? Only as far as the church wants? Were such an attitude more prevalent, the sun might still be revolving around the earth, at least in the minds of we poor humans.
What exactly makes the creation of life the sole purbiew of any supposed god. Particularly what differentiates it from the ability to travel to the heavens, something which before this century was only in his domain?
I don't believe in god, but I do believe its man's responsibility to know as much as he can about himself and the world around him.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
I find it rather amusing that this "Mycoplasma genitalium" they are using that is the simplest known form of life on earth is to be found in the "human genital tract".
I was actualy a little un-impressed when I read the article, they have found this poor little critter with just 480 genes, some of which they have judged as redundant. Reading between the lines i'll try to give an explenation on what they plan to do.
Having extracted the relevent peices of dna they will drop them in a test tube. Into the test tube will then go some of those weird protean machines you find in cells that takes dna and translates it into strands of protean. These starands of protean will then fold into lumps of protean (the very process that new IBM machine wants to simulate)that will procede to bounce around. The newly formed lumps of protean will stick together when random chance causes matching faces to meet and hey presto you a the functioning components of a cell.
Its actualy a little more complex than this but still decidedly un-impressive, basicly this could have been done already but they needed to find something simple enough to manage.
So will this lead to a new era of genetic enginearing? Potentialy yes, when we write software the easiest thing to do is take an existing program, strip out all the junk you don't want (or don't understand) until you have something basic to build on, the same applys to genetics.
Basicly all this 'consult the church' type stuff is almost certainly hype to get the press and public attention they want. The end result? well they get noticed and get the reasearch grant extension they need to actualy do this stuff (It's basicly all talk at the moment).
With 600 comments already in queue, I doubt anyone will see this, btu oh well...
1. The time to ask "Should we create life?" is not when the capability is at hand. The time to ask this question was about fifty years ago. If the answer is "No," the you avoid the research that can make it possible. Now it's too late to really consider the question. If something can be done, it will.
2. While this is an interesting advance, it is an expected and not very revolutionary one. Consider the following headline: "Carpenters learn to assemble prefab homes." That's what this seems to amount to. Scientists have identified already existing gense that control existing life. When they can engineer never-before-seen genes adn create life from those, I'll be a lot more impressed. That's be the headline that reads "Carpenters plant seed; grow homes in less than a day."
My HS bio teacher was a bit overqualified for the position - vietnam medic, former FDA biogeneticist, etc. taught 'cause he liked to, could have been raking in 6 figure salaries if he wanted to.
So i asked him the science vs. god thing.
He told me that it's exactly the opposite - that the more he discovers about biological systems, the more he's *certian* that a higher being had a hand in creation.
Food for thought, I guess.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Today was the last day of my Ethics class, and the topic of discussion was the ethics of technology. And boy, lemme tell ya, it ain't always fun being the smart-ass programmer guy with opinions. Turns out it was me and the cute girl who doesn't say much vs. the rest of the class. Real fun. The discussion on abortion was far less heated.
As a devout agnostic, I consider God to be the unknowable. No just what's over the next hill, but the Mystery itself. That being said, I think it's way too easy for people to say "that's God's business," as if the Bible contains a job discription and mission statement.
As far as the social implications go, the wish for slower technological growth is just that: a wish. People will continue to pry apart the nuts and bolts of the universe, and the people who are in charge of the distribution of new technology might as well be moderate to the point of brain death.
I, for one, would rather have Uncle Sam mucking about with genetic technology than some mullah who's reading into the Koran a bit too much (or a devout neo-Orthodox Greek feminist/part-time Marxist rebel, your radical minority here). I'm kinda happy with my bourgeois, liberal, feminist, psuedo-revolutionary, Mountain Dew, whitey, fucknut life. I don't want someone who believes very much in what somebody else told them to kill me, my friends, my family, and sure, even the assholes in the SUVs. No, I don't think the US is peacful, kind, impartial, or even good. But we are very slow to move, and we disagree with ourselves. Who better to have their hand on the trigger than a schizophrenic imperialist with delusions of grandeur and everything to lose?
I'm also not a big fan of the "it's not natural" arguments. Western thought tends to seperate Nature and Man, with disasterous results for Nature. I consider both myself and the keyboard I'm typing on to be natural. It's not like we create matter from a vacuum, right? It's not like we change the laws of physics to help us make things.
Everything you're not equipped with from birth is "unnatural" if you think about it. The "natural" place for a rock is on the ground, not in a human's hand, skinning an antelope. Sticks belong on trees or on the ground, not being used to thresh grain.
As humans, our nature is to fuck with things incessantly. Yes, we run into problems because of this, but it's the way we are. Pandora's box anyone?
Right. My thinkgeek.com order of Penguin caffeinated peppermints just came in, so I'm just a *wee* bit jumpy. Woo!
-- I can't think of anything witty to put here. Sorry.