Artificial Life May Be Possible Within Ten Years

CapedOpossum writes "According to an article from a few weeks back on CNN, researchers in the field of genetics and biology think that we may be able to artificially create life within the next decade. From the article: 'Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer. Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of 'wet artificial life. "It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could run amok, but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.'"

Uh.

[Wilson_6500]

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

Between that and the guy who wants to extend the genetic code to twelve bases, it seems a little avant-garde to just trust everything to evolution (although, in a sense, I suppose that's the point of being a forerunner). It seems that would be more useful to trust evolution for advancement only in the intermediate phases of getting organisms that do what we want, rather than letting them evolve and evolve until we have the final designs for proto-organisms that do what we want. Upon reflection, I don't really expect them to try the latter method since it would lead to all kinds of dead ends, but I do sorta wonder how many other people out there will jump to that conclusion like I did. Of course, dead ends in genetics maybe don't matter if you're breeding billions of proto-organisms and have a reliable method for killing the ones you know you don't want. Then again, unless you remove the ability of the organisms to breed (which, if we're designing them from scratch, may not be too hard), evolution will just continue on even after you have what you think is your final design.

I guess all this thinking is a little preliminary. People will begin to take these issues perhaps a little more seriously when the time comes to start breeding little proto-organisms.

Re:Woo Hoo!

[alexj33]

ID Proponents will feel more validated after this event happens; not less.

If scientific intelligence creates life in a lab, such a breakthrough of course won't show that life came about on its own without an intelligence.

Re:Self destruction

[Xonstantine]

In short, those sane enough to be capable aren't insane enough to actually want to kill *everyone*.

Not really. Sanity is relative and evolving cultural standard, after all.

All you really need is a motivated, talented, sociopathic personality that believes a doomsday device is to his or her benefit or furthers his goals.

Re:Woo Hoo!

[Loether]

I wonder if the ID proponents do feel more validated will they agree that the scientists that created the life are far closer to being a god than they will ever be?

Re:It's Alive!

[wizardforce]

I shudder to think that an already overcrowded planet has to make more room for "fake babies".

notice that problem wasn't caused by the creation of artificial life, it is a sad consequence of ancient cultures not adapting to technology that increases the human life span. many cultures adapted to the unfortunate fact that to keep populations stable one might need to have twice as many kids as there were parents. once technology eliminated alot of childhood diseases the birthrates that sustained humanity before now caused an unsustainable boom in population growth.

the potential for anarchy is more than a slight worry for me, being that even if you could replicate the inner-workings of life, it doesn't mean you can give it a "soul".

I hear that argument a lot, that just because we could understand the entirety of human biology that we somehow wouldn't understand what makes us human, usually the view is that something supernatural governs the soul; although that fails to take into account environmental factors- tumors and brain damage for example can permanently alter personality, there are cases for example like phineas gage where permanent alterations in who he was occured. the man was never the same after that accident, you could say his soul was never the same. damage to the amygdala can cause alterations to emotional states, drugs can permanently alter emotional states as well.

our streets are filled with wandering empty shells with no knowledge of "right" and "wrong". Just because science "can do it" doesn't always mean it "should do it".

interesting you mention that, another view commonly held that our society is "degrading" from the "good old days" when most peopel don't realize how violent and utterly appalling most of human history was. what exactly do you think we are degrading from? we dont burn people at the stake like was a common punishment in the past, we dont stone people to death [in most countries] we dont enslave entire swaths of people on the basis of how much melanin was in their skin or destroy entire civilizations [mayan aztec] with diseases and war; Cortez for example is responsible in part for a civilization of 25 million being wiped out in south america. If anything society is getting less violent and more civilized as technology advances. I think that people should really start thinking for themselves what makes us human and do some research on human history so that we do not reverty back to such violence.

Re:It's Alive!

[Joe Tie.]

People said, to the word, the exact same thing about babies born from IVF therapy. Do you think they're soulless automatons too? Should we, perhaps, go kill them all for the greater good of our super-moral "normals"? Don't you see just a bit of irony in your denial to give something a chance at life, partially from revulsion over it being different, in terms of reasoning from your own position of moral superiority?

Re:Woo Hoo!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It should be an interesting test. If the ID crowd are sincere in their claim that the Desginer doesn't have to be divine, they'll be delighted. If, on the other hand, they're really just a bunch of religious fanatics, they'll be appalled. (I know which way I'm betting.)

Evaluate the claims by looking at the company

[wintermute42]

I've been to Venice, Italy once for six days. I still dream of going back. Venice is one of the great jewels of humanity, a place like no other. Assuming that the Italian government and regulations didn't drive me crazy, I'd love to love in Venice.

This train of through seems to have been the logic behind ProtoLife. The company has been founded and run by a group of Americans without any particular experience in molecular biology or any other kind of biology. The closest they seem to get is an organic chemist. The whole motivo esistere (reason to exist) seems to be "lets do something that sounds cool in the coolest city in the world". Given their backgrounds, I think that there are serious questions about whether some of the people involved have any real understanding of experimental method (and instrumenting a roulette wheel doesn't count), much less the "wet lab" work of biology.

In short, this is not a serious company and they don't deserve to have any claims they make taken seriously. If artificial life is created in ten years it seems very unlikely that this will have been done at ProtoLife.

In theory this is a start-up company that is supposed to have some prospect of making money. Artificial life, which really amounts to assembling pieces (enzymes and organelles from cells, along with selected genes). This doesn't mean that the assembled organism is of any use from a commercial stand point. This just reinforced the idea that this company is nothing more than a hobby.

Re:Seriously

[asolipsist]

Apparently not too hard; you only took 9 months of development.

That's only 9 months of manufacturing, it took over a billion years of R&D to flesh out the design.

Re:Seriously

[misanthrope101]

Evolutionary theory doesn't say that humans "just randomly formed." Creationist caricatures of Darwinism bear little resemblance to actual evolutionary theory.

That's part of the reason it's so hard to have a debate on the subject. It's difficult to even get to the subject, because you have to wade through so many absurd assumptions about what evolution is (meaning--what the scientific theory is) before you can argue about whether it's right or wrong. Usually we never get to that point, because people don't want to give up their cherished illusions that Darwinism is best summed up by stuff like "Frog+time=prince."

It would be like me arguing against voting Republican because they eat babies. They don't eat babies, but if I couldn't give up that caricature, we could never get to the point of talking about their actual platform or policies.