Biologist (Almost) Creates Artificial Life 539
Aditya Malik writes "Wired has an interesting story up about how a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building 'protocells' from artificial molecules which are very close to satisfying the conditions for being 'alive.' 'Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.' This obviously raises some questions about creationism, not to mention some scary bio-research-gone-wild scenarios."
Re:grey goo? (Score:1, Informative)
Wouldn't that be green goo? Grey goo is non-biologic mini Von Neumann machines.
Re:Let me guess... (Score:3, Informative)
He tried to create a phallic looking creature.
Just in case anyone doesn't get it [ctrlaltdel-online.com]...
Re:grey goo? (Score:3, Informative)
Do von neumann machines have to be made out of inorganic materials? If not, I think these qualify, although green goo might be more precise.
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:5, Informative)
All organisms self replicate. Just because something is lab-made doesn't mean it would magically not be subject to evolutionary forces.
Having not been made by natural evolutionary forces, it's unlikely they would be fit to survive in any natural environment. These things have not been instilled with any defenses against things looking to eat them including bacteria. Didn't read the article, but I would guess they aren't capable of digesting molecules, they probably have to be presented with ready to go "nutrients" to replicate, move or do anything. You don't find that anywhere in the real world, in fact, as I recall you don't even find that in your bloodstream. ATP is what your molecules use for power, but you only get that once your cells import glucose and your mitochondria turn it into ATP.
In other words, they have absolutely no way to eat anything they would need to survive.
In evolutionary biology, a major cause of extinction, at least in theory, is called "changing rules." If you're an organism doing well, you're highly adapted to your environment and proliferate. Think of the dinosaurs, they ruled the earth, bigger was better. Mammals were barely hanging on for dear life, small, furry, warm blooded, nocturnal didn't make sense at the time. If the rules suddenly change though through environmental shift, you might not be fit for the new environment. The asteroid hits, an ice age happens, and suddenly cold-blooded huge lizards can't cut it and massively go extinct. The only reason reptiles remain today is that there was significant variation in that clade that allowed some of them to survive in the new game.
These artificial bugs are barely managing to survive in an environment tailored to them, they can't replicate on their own. They also appear to have no variation. If they get out of their environment, they have no chance of survival. It's precisely because they're subject to evolutionary forces that they have no chance.
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:5, Informative)
There is strong evidence that dinosaurs were in fact warm blooded and were not reptiles. Many actually lived in colder climates in the northern regions of the globe.
Re:To all worried about "grey goo"... (Score:5, Informative)
Recall that bacteria have had around 4 billion years to turn Earth into a nanopocalyptic wasteland.
You mean like the Oxygen Catastrophe [wikipedia.org], where uncontrollably replicating microbiomachines saturated the atmosphere with a waste product so caustic that it rotted the very rocks out from under them?
Re:What questions exactly? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, in this case it would be a scientist doing it intentionally, rather than it occurring by chance in the primordial soup, but it shows that in principle it is possible.
I'm not a big fan of the "Chance" line of reasoning behind evolution. Much like the term "theory," it is very easily abused to confuse people.
What is improbable on a small scale becomes almost inevitable when we look at the kind of time periods and the amount of opportunity available in 5 billion years. It's not unreasonable to believe that the formation of life on earth isn't only probable, but virtually assured.
Here's a great example: It's improbable that either of us will die in a car accident. Possible, but not so likely. But, if you look at slash dot as a whole, it's almost inevitable. Expand that to humanity, and for all practical purposes it's assured to be a common phenomena. Now, expand a small probability over 5 billion years, and by the number of proteins in the ocean and the formation of life starts seeming like less a matter of random "chance."
The only real question is what are the exact odds, and what truly is required...
not quite there (Score:3, Informative)
These guys aren't anywhere near making anything as complex as actual biological life. What they're doing is more like biological engineering than biology. TFA reports they are close to making a very simple self-replicating system...
it's important to note that this thing they haven't made yet wouldn't be able to self-replicate without 'help' from the researchers once they actually DO make it. Of course, down the road they would like to get something that could be autonomous, but even then it wouldn't be able to survive outside the lab.
From TFA:
and
So we're really far off from what you're speculating about...but, to address your concerns, alarmism about this research along the same lines as the people who are afraid that CERN will open a black hole that will swallow the earth (not saying you are alarmist...but some are).
Bottom line is, once they make a self-replicating artificial organism that can also exist outside the lab we should put it in the same level of quarantine that we give the nastiest of the nasty biochem. weapons or diseases we keep for research. It's not like we don't know how to safely work with dangerous substances/organisms.
Re:Creationism? (Score:2, Informative)
David questions God, Jesus questioned God, and he was completely without sin.
The only "unforgivable sin" is "blasphemy against the holy spirit" which amounts to seeing evidence of God's power and love and decrying it as the work of Satan. It's big theological mess to really wade through.
No problem if you contemplate RNA instead. (Score:3, Informative)
Whenever I start contemplating DNA (!), self-reproduction and the utter insanity of how complex the machinery of a single cell is, much less multicellular life, much less an animal, much less a self-aware brain, I just shake my head in wonder.
Doesn't bother me. Evolution is a massively parallel computation and has been going on for a LONG time.
If you skip DNA and just look at RNA it all gets easy:
- RNA caries genetic information and can be copied by an appropriate enzyme. (It's less stable than DNA, but quite stable enough to form the genomes of viruses. At the early stages, with no competition yet, being error-prone is actually good.)
- RNA has enzymatic activity. (It's not as strong or as versatile as protein-based enzymens. But it is quite capable of folding itself up into structures coded by its sequence, sticking together at appropriate places and presenting controlled patterns of charges on outer surfaces of a controlled shape, to become a little molecular machine.
Nucleotides line themselves up on a strand of either RNA or DNA to form the complimentary code sequence. They'll bind themselves into a strand given enough time and jostling. But if you have a RNA strand that also sometimes folds up into a little zipper-tab that runs down the lined-up RNA bases and sticks them together into a fresh strand you're all set:
- You'll eventually have both that and its compliment hanging around in the same container.
- At some point the strand that folds up into a zipper will zip up the new bases stuck to its complimentary strand. Then you have TWO zippers tab strands plus a complimentary strand.
- Now the zipper strand(s) start churning out new zipper strands and complimentary strands.
Slow at first, because rev 0.1 probably doesn't work well and it's completely dependent on randomly occurring bases for "food". But with the exponential under way the errors start to accumulate. Now you get some that are better at zipping than others - and they dominate the regions where they occur. And you get strands with multiple copies and other noise sequences - which can now evolve separately within the strand and evolve new functions.
Whenever a strand evolves one of its "spare" "genes" into a machine to help out, it becomes more successful.
From there you can evolve:
- Machines to make components of the system from other "useless" stuff.
- Machines to string amino-acids into useful structural stuff - and eventually better machines.
- Machines to control a container, creating the "cell" and its division mechanism.
- Machines to make backup copies of the RNA code in more stable DNA and then make more RNA from that.
and so on.
There's plenty of suggestions that this is what happened. For instance: Most of the machinery of RNA-directed protein synthesis - both most of the parts of the ribosome (the stringing factory) and all of the transfer RNA (the amino-acid carrier/code reader mechanisms) are RNA enzymes.
So, no, contemplating the current complexity doesn't bother me at all. It can all be explained by evolution from a single, simple, mechanism that could easily be produced in millions of years of random abiotic chemical reactions in a planetary scale vat of solar-irradiated, weather-stirred chemicals.
Re:Interesting work (Score:5, Informative)
The 'problem', if one may state it as such, is in your presentation of the options...
A. the universe always existed
B. it was created by something/someone.
That's really three options...
A. the universe always existed
B. it popped into existence due to something, we don't know what - we may never find out
C. it was created by someone, and we call that someone God.
B and C are distinctly different; just because I have no explanation of what caused the Big Bang, doesn't mean 'God did it'. Even if scientists told me right now that it's impossible to find out what caused the Big Bang (which is very likely), it doesn't mean 'God did it'. 'God did it' isn't an answer to a question - it is a belief. I have no problems with beliefs (Hello, I'm an agnostic), but too often the 'God did it'-approach is used as a substitute for actual answers.
Back on-topic... you don't ultimately need one or the other having to always have existed. Keep in mind that the prevailing idea is that 'before the universe existed' is a problematic sentence as there is no 'before the universe existed'.. time, if you will, did not exist until the universe began.
Re:Interesting work (Score:3, Informative)
...There are a bunch of people who argue that the King James version is the "correct, God-inspired translation....
Unless you know Hebrew and Greek, a way to get around this is to get as many translations you can afford and compare them. It turns out most of them agree amazingly well except those put out by specific organizations that have certain of their doctrines reflected in their own specialized translation.
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:4, Informative)
No. Microbes have to control their pH levels otherwise their own operation will denature their proteins, literally tearing them apart. This is micro-biology 101.
Re:There is nothing "unnatural" about science (Score:4, Informative)
You don't GET to go outside the system. There is no unnatural .
One completely valid definition of "natural" is "not made/influenced by humans". That is in fact the most common meaning of the word "natural". Or to put it another way, if it is "made", it is not "natural". If it is "natural", it was "formed" or "evolved".
Then of course "unnatural" has additional meaning, something like "extraordinary in a bad or sinister way". Like "unnatural weather".
I'm sorry (well, not really), but you have no authority to decide what words mean...
Re:not quite there (Score:3, Informative)
If something becomes autonomous on it's own, it does it under same restrictions of biological evolution as everything else now living.
What defence against bacteria would this new life have? None. Could it develop some? I don't think it'd have time... Bacteria and archae have biochemical machinery for attack and defence, predation, battle and digestion, that has evolved for and survived almost 4 billion years. Protists have inherited a lot of that machinery and developed new more complex machinery to do the same over last maybe billion years. What we have now is best of the best, the stuff that has been able to beat everything that no longer exists.
So if this new life would start spreadig enough to make a food source, it would be eaten. And it would not have time to develop any defences, and it would not be the only food of microbes eating it, so it would be eaten to extinction.
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually the evidence for warm blooded dinosaurs is slim at best.
According to this paper [fsu.edu] there might be a possibility for some number of warm blooded dinosaurs, but it is a more of a stretch to say that all (or even majority) of them were warm blooded. You should read that paper because it answers much of your points (with arguments/data).
I have pretty much no knowledge about dinosaurs but you can use a bit of common sense here. Size has its limits. It doesn't matter if the animal is cold or warm blooded, the bigger the animal, the relatively slower it is. So just to clarify, t-rex probably was relatively slow. If it were fast, its leg muscles should be bigger than whole its body, which is impossible. And you can always use elephants for the example. Elephants can't run. They can walk a bit faster. But to say they are fast is a exaggeration.
Re:Self Replicating? (Score:2, Informative)
I have pretty much no knowledge about dinosaurs [...] Elephants can't run. They can walk a bit faster. But to say they are fast is a exaggeration
You don't know anything about elephants either, do you ?
You won't keep up with an (african) elephant that is "walking a bit faster" ! See e.g. here. [rvc.ac.uk]
And your common sense isn't all that common to me. I fail to see why the fact that an elephant may not be that fast means that a t-rex was slow. For one, an elephant probably doesn't need speed, while a t-rex being a predator would most likely have benefited from it and thus also developed it.
Re:To all worried about "grey goo"... (Score:3, Informative)
"I fail to see how anyone can, with a straight face (not to mention a clear conscience), claim to *know* what happened 300 million years ago and then try and account for some hole in the theory."
The Great Oxidation happened 2.4 (American) billion years ago, not 300 million. Evidence for it exists in "banded iron" deposits, which are various iron oxides that aren't found prior to that period (you need oxygen to oxidise iron), and more recently, the results of high-resolution chemostratigraphy also confirm that it occurred.