Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Join with me in our prayer
Our father who art on Slashdot
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
We, as always, should proceed with caution and forethought. When we create new lifeforms, we should consider the ethical ramifications first. No question. However, you want science to only go so far, and no farther. Who draws that line? And, how are you going to enforce said limitation? I think Galileo said it best: "I refuse to believe in a God that would grant us intelligence and curiousity, and then have us forego their use." (BTW, if I have the quote wrong, I'd appreciate a reference to the correct version). If, you have a particular diety you believe created the Universe and has some Plan for us, think long and hard before you start trying to speak in His/Her name.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
- 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.
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.
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
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!
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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.
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.