Scientists Attempting to Create Simple Life Form 580
derubergeek writes "The Washington Post is reporting on an apparently credible project to create a simple life form in a petri dish. The goal is two-fold: 1) to actually create a unique life form essentially from scratch and (more importantly) 2) to extensively analyze and model the entire biology of this critter. Exciting and scary at the same time. From the article, it sounds as if they are quite wary of their project and fascinated at the same time. I usually refer to that sensation as 'That little voice that I should have listened to...'" There's also a NY Times article.
Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:3, Insightful)
This here is the time to start thinking about everything science fiction has ever told us when dealing with artificaial life. It's one of the few sub-genres of science fiction that's almost always cautionary... from 'Frankenstein'--
"FIRST POST... BAAAAD!!"
--to 'Species'--
"That hole in his back makes him look just like the goatse.cx guy... except it's because his spine was torn out."
Man will create life. There's no doubt about it. It's a given. Eventually, we'll no doubt even create life that looks, acts, and feels human. What we should never forget, however, is that we are stepping into territory where angels fear to tread and should take each action with only after gut-wrenching, soul-searching thought.
Is it resonsible, moral, or ethical to create life when the planet is as overcrowded as it is?
Is it ethical to create life that can feel, think, or be hurt when you *know* we're going to dissect and vivisect of what we create?
Is it ethical or responsible to create life, when we know that we're already making serious mistakes in genetic engineering, such as the genes that recently jumped between soya and corn?
This is a wonderful new field of science that has incredible potential for human advancement. It also has incredible potential for misuse and unethical behavior.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:4, Funny)
That said, if these things ever get out of the lab before our knowledge about genetics is complete, we are screwed. Nature has put into DNA many checks and switches to prevent rampant mutations, which the humans will not bother to put in, or won't be aware of. Organism loose, mutating at will, and you got yourself a killer strain of urinary infection-causing organisms. I say that if the people around the lab start pissing blood, we gotta have a nuke ready to wipe out the area. It's the only way to be sure.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking generally, those checks are not placed in the organisms to protect the greater biosphere, as you implicitly claim. Why would urinary tract bacteria put in mutation controls if by removing them they could become a "killer strain", vastly more successful? Sounds like it's all gravy for the urinary bacteria, no?
The real reason those checks exist is that in general, mutation is bad. As you make a given generation take on more and more mutations, the probability approaches 1 that at least one of those mutations will be fatal. This is a slight oversimplication, but the probability that two mutations "cancel" or that one buffers the other, while non-zero, is even smaller then the odds of one mutation being neutral or beneficial, and can be ignored, especially as the number of mutations in a given offspring increases (because it takes those small probabilities and starts raising them to large powers, sending them to 0). As you get up into the tens, hundreds, or thousands of mutations (that aren't on introns), the organism just isn't going to survive that.
Thus, mankind will indeed need to copy those checks and balances, or his organisms will swiftly die. In fact, almost anything we could "build" right now would swiftly die in the real world, which is immensely more hostile to life now then it was several billion years ago. That may sound wierd, but it's true; show any weakness (AIDS, for instance) and any of millions of types of bacteria, animal parasites, insects, fungi, viruses, and assorted other nasties are literally ready to eat you for lunch, all of which you can currently repel, come to some form of balance with, or avoid for the most part. It will be a long time before Man creates anything truly original, and even longer before it is strong enough to threaten anything seriously.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt we are going to be pumping out thousands of lifeforms as big as humans just for the hell of it. Why not produce lifeforms that can (for example) consume greenhouse gasses and produce energy? That would certainly reduce the strain on the environment.
You mean like the special breeds of rats and mice that we use in labratories? Already been done, essentially.
Didn't happen. Prove that this has happened.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:3, Interesting)
Do we really know what the long-term consequences of releasing such organisms into our ecosystem would be? Even if they are not deliberately released, if they are widely used, they're gonna get out sooner or later. Even if they're somehow designed to die outside the lab or CO2 processing plant, there's still the distinct possibility of a mutated strain that bypasses those controls.
Who knows? Create a CO2 eating microbe today...in five hundred years, or even fifty, 90% of the Earth's plant life may end up dead for lack of CO2 because these little buggers have multiplied and spread out of control.
The Earth is an incredibly complex, carefully balanced system. Trying to engineer it too excessively when we're really not sure at all what we're doing could backfire in a big way.
DennyK
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not produce lifeforms that can (for example) consume greenhouse gasses and produce energy?
I'm not in principle opposed to the idea. But then again, the people who will be coding the DNA are the same people who can't check IIS buffers for overruns.
I grew up in Mississippi. About 100 years ago, everyone was worried about soil erosion. Somebody came up with a great idea to prevent erosion: introduce a vine from Asia that had really stubborn roots and could hold soil down. The vine? Kudzu. Now the whole deep South is overrun with the damn stuff and they can't get rid of it. The effects of the introduction on the ecosystem were much broader than anyone had anticipated. Something tells me that releasing a life form that eats greenhouse gases would have even greater effects.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Your caution is well advised.
If anything is obvious and plainly evident, it is that mankind has not done the most commendable job of managing the current set of life forms on planet earth.
If there are overly many human beings for our existing biosphere and too many of them are living unhappy lives, then producing other sentient life forms is not likely to improve things, unless they eat septic sludge and excrete something that counts as food to us.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm suprised and dissapointed at the number of kneejerk luddites in this thread who automatically make some magical connection between micro-organisms(ie. simple life, the kind which first formed several billion years ago), and human life(ie. complex life, the kind which formed several hundred million years ago), and therefore declare that all experiments of this type are dangerous. Creating simple life forms is merely a means to the end of learning more of our origins -- knowlege which is important in the grand scheme of our understanding of the universe.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:4, Informative)
I think we covered this in the "Gene jumping" thread. The gene's didn't jump, the two seperate products were mixed together, as solids, and so some of the genetically modifed stuff got in with the non genetically modified stuff and when ingested, poff. The genes are merged. Or some such nonsense. The article had nothing to do with genes jumping speceies. Just another case of
Re:Have they not seen Wierd [sic] Science (Score:5, Funny)
Heck, forget honest mistakes made by intelligent, thoughtful, ethical scientists; forget unethical misuses slowly plotted by glacial corporations and governments. What I'm worried about is N years after that, when the biology script kiddies swing into action.
Re:Have they not seen Wierd Science (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, we are here...
Not to be cynical but when will man reallize that playing god never pays off!
Safe? (Score:5, Funny)
hmmm...where have I heard this before? Something to do with female dinosaurs and frog DNA.
Re:Safe? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Safe? (Score:3, Funny)
And they took precautions to keep it from getting away too, remember? They made it female so it could be "easier to control".
Also, as pointed out in the movie, these guys must not have not been around many women.
Frankenstein (Score:3, Interesting)
As they say that they're going to do it in a "petri dish" I assume that we will not see Frankenstein, but rather Flubber.
I though that this has been done part-way in simulations of earths early atmosphere using electic discharges. At least they made aminoacids that way (I think they did that).
Re:Frankenstein (Score:5, Funny)
Amino acids are to life as a bolt is to a spaceshuttle, so no, they didn't do this yet.
Re:Frankenstein (Score:5, Informative)
In the '50s they put some simple chemicals (methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water) in a sealed vessel and added energy (as electrical discharges). They found about 2% of the material formed amino acids.
Re:Frankenstein (Score:4, Informative)
However, it did not produce all amino acids required for life as we know it. Moreover, there is no known chemical pathway to go from a bunch of amino acids to DNA/RNA. Plus there is also significant debate about whether the initial atmosphere they began with existed on Earth at the time of the origins of life.
Other researchers have suggested that inoganic forms of proto-life (crystal growth) may have had a role in the catalysis of organic chemicals to actually get to something leading to RNA/DNA.
I'm not saying that there is anything particularly magic about the formation of life, just that Miller-Urey is a very small part of a very big question.
It might escape (Score:2, Funny)
You Mean (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You Mean (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You Mean (Score:2)
Re:You Mean (Score:2, Funny)
Re:You Mean (Score:2, Funny)
I used to do that as a child (Score:5, Funny)
They already have a great example (Score:5, Funny)
You all know where this will lead (Score:2, Funny)
Not from scratch, technically (Score:5, Informative)
They're taking an already extant organism, "hollowing it out" as it were, and seeing if it can live and reproduce normally with a series of increasingly customized (and minimal) genetic material. Not creating something from nothing.
Re:Not from scratch, technically (Score:3, Redundant)
That is simply because we cannot yet manipulate things at the molecular level in sufficient quantity or resolution. Once we can, then someone might not even start with an existing organism's shell script wrapper.
Of course, I suppose, even then, they would not be starting from "nothing".
This sounds strangely familiar... (Score:2, Interesting)
Call me crazy, but I see a parallel here with this [slashdot.org]. - Taking an existing, known format and minimising it as far as possible. Heck - even the number returned by the code is relevant.
Re:Not from scratch, technically (Score:5, Interesting)
Why THIS bacterium?! (Score:5, Funny)
If they had to choose a bacteria to do unpredictable and possible dangerous experimentation with, why did they choose one that is known to cause crotch-burn in humans?!
Re:Why THIS bacterium?! (Score:3, Funny)
Probably because it was the simplest form, or the easiest to work with that they could obtain over the counter.
(an alternate theory might have something to do with culling the herd.)
Re:Why THIS bacterium?! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why THIS bacterium?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why THIS bacterium?! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why THIS bacterium?! (Score:3, Informative)
Is it actually creating life though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it actually creating life though? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Is it actually creating life though? (Score:3, Interesting)
As I responded to another post, I'm unsure as to how much of the actual cell structure (aside from the membrane) will remain...i.e., nucleus, mytochondria, etc..
I'm viewing it as 'creating life' in the sense that someone who 'creates software' doesn't actually build the computer from sand, program the O/S in machine, and design & implement a compiler (at least not typically - I have a handful of friends who always seem to sidetrack themselves down that path...).
his name... (Score:4, Funny)
I vote for the name "spam"
Re:his name... (Score:2)
Re:his name... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:his name... (Score:2)
God must be a friggin boring dude. The 2 non-characters in his Eden story have a name, whereas the only interesting one (with a personality) is the snake... I would have called him George.
Adam, Eve & George.
Way cooler! Good for the sales.
Re:his name... (Score:2)
Franken-blob... (Score:2, Funny)
I wonder... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Funny)
They stole the idea! (Score:2, Funny)
LFS (Score:3, Funny)
Totally not original (Score:2)
Aaargh (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankenstein was a story. It was fiction. And so was Jurassic Park, and so was Gattaca. I won't comment on the Bible here, although my view of that book is probably pretty clear from the context
Re:Aaargh (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Einstein would have disagreed with you.
Re:Aaargh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Aaargh (Score:5, Funny)
Creating a three-assed monkey: Bad.
It's really not that hard.
--
Damn the Emperor!
Re:Aaargh (Score:3, Insightful)
What Bible-thumpers like myself contend is that man's ability to create often outpaces man's wisdom to use. Do you can consider that a controversial argument? I think that the "creation" (not really a creation, more like stripping the engine and transmission out of a car and replacing them) is the first step into creating an unimaginably powerful force. Whether that force will be for good or evil is yet to be seen.
Simply because one can make the case that a force can save lives does not automatically trump any force for evil it may introduce concomitantly. See Edward Teller...
Anyhow, at this point, it's way too late to have this debate. The genie is already out of the bottle, and now we have to ensure that the good guys stay ahead of the bad guys in this race.
Re:Aaargh (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I went to see Stephen Hawking speak a few years back, and outside the building were a group of a dozen or so protesters. They were protesting the existence of black holes etc... claiming that Hawking was sent by Satan to lure us away from the Bible.
I can't imagine anything more benign than sitting in a wheelchair thinking about what peices of the universe billions of miles away are like. But, it goes against the bible, so it is 'immoral'.
-see you in hell
Re:Aaargh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Aaargh (Score:2)
Fantastic write up!
Mod parent up!
D.
Re:Aaargh (Score:2)
Tell me how is so almost-certain that biological manufacture of organisms will save lives.
I think the only "inevitable" use of technologoy is that it will be used to hurt someone.
Now, I don't find any moral concerns with biological research that doesn't involve harming people, nor do I find any ethical problems if they're honest. I don't think that we're "playing God" if we create new life or alter extant life--
Or, rather, we are, but He wants us to.
Re:Aaargh (Score:2, Interesting)
Your "saving lives" comment is meaningless without ethics... If there are no ethics, why do you want to "save lives"? With no ethics, saving lives is a "so what, who cares, it doesn't help me right here, right now" proposition.
Re:Aaargh (Score:3, Insightful)
On playing God (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, according to a Catholic theologian when asked about this, to "play God" you would have to invent the rules then sit back and watch what happens within the rules. What we do is try to figure out what the rules are and then do everything we can within them. So trying to create life within the rules that we've got is not "plyaing God" but "playing Man".
Re:Aaargh (Score:2)
Re:Aaargh (Score:3, Insightful)
Hopefully such a hypothetical situation will never arise, but what if the only feasible way to save 500 people was to sacrifice 100? (The recent hostage situation in Moscow comes to mind, but it's far from clear that the use of gas was in fact the only feasible way, or that the hostages were otherwise sure to die.) What if the only way to save 2 lives were to sacrifice one? What if the one was a friend, and the two were strangers?
And then there is the question of life. All life is not regarded morally equal, for we have little qualms in eating vegetables, and even have even less care for the millions and millions of minute organisms that die through our action or inaction every day. What makes a life valuable? It's a hard question, and not simply solved by saying that it's "human" or not. What is so special about a bunch of genes by themsleves?
These questions are hard, as demonstrated by the lack of widely accepted answers. Blanket dismissals though just hide the problem. If the problem is not confronted, then we may be acting in ways that we would regard as morally wrong if we later viewed them in a rational light. In that sense, not thinking about these problems can itself be regarded as amoral.
Considering... (Score:2, Funny)
Who knew they had advanced so far in subtle humor?
Results to appear in ... (Score:5, Funny)
The New England Journal of Evil
Re:Results to appear in ... (Score:2)
Fridge. (Score:2)
They should try a fridge instead. Last week i looked in there and i swear something jumped at me!
Creator? God? (Score:3, Interesting)
If man creates a new life form by definition man is the "Creator" of that life form. If somehow in a distance future man builds on this knowledge and creates an intelligent life form, from scratch, would man be it's "Creator"? If so, could one say that man is it's God?
This was touched upon in the Deep Space 9 trek series. The Dominan (sp?) created two life forms and the life forms acknowledged their "Creators" as their God.
Who knows?
Nick Powers
Excellent National Academy of Sciences Report... (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be a Luddite... (Score:2)
Life will find a way.
Try it with silicon (Score:3, Interesting)
Exciting Modeling Prospects (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm... a lot of trees will die if Boehringer Mannheim tries to print this one out (a la biochemical pathways).
Get your own dirt! (Score:5, Funny)
The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man making contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."
The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"
Re:Get your own dirt! (Score:3, Insightful)
- First they promoted the flat earth
- Then they promoted the Terra-centric planetary system.
- Then they promoted the young earth theory.*
- Then they denied evolution.**
- Then they said only god could make life.
- Now they say only god can make dirt.
Religion will always be able to regroup and criticize, without offering anything other than mircales and mythology. Remember how the Democrats lost this mid-term, by criticizing with no real substance? So will science eventually obviate the need for all creationist religions by eventually leaving religion with so little ground to stand on, no one will take it's claims seriously!
As an athiest, and IMHO, the only "religions" science won't dismantle are the Theravada Buddhists and Confuscists, because they don't make such gross claims.
* (There's a childrens book for Christians that claims t-rex's teeth were used for cracking nuts, and that they got along with men before original sin.)
** (Of course, finches and antibiotics put this to rest. Fortunately the Roman Catholics were smart enough to reverse course up to this point, just look at rights of ordainment, revised in 1987.)
Already been done... (Score:2, Insightful)
But ... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to make a car you need to define "what is a car", so far so good ... If you want to make "life" they will first need to define what exactly the criteria are before we can call one of their siblings "life".
Is it life because it moves,breathes, contains other cells, eats, sleeps, breeds, farths, burps ??
At which point exactly do we call an life ?
Hacking life (Score:2)
Organic Programming Language + Printer (Score:2)
That's what is really behind this project, not some waste management as they want you to believe.
Nanotech? (Score:2)
What they are doing here looks like its not totally from scratch. They are taking an already existing shell and then putting some other stuff in there and seeing if it comes to life.
This is very cool, but really a stepping stone to "life from scratch". How long? 5 years, 10?
The Sweet Melody of Blood Music (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the same as the premise of the science fiction book by Greg Bear Blood Music .
In which a researcher inadvertently creates sentient cells. But more importantly, the book describes a near future in which biological research outpaces computer research and that it spawns an entire "Gene Valley" type area as opposed to a "Silicon Valley". With organisms being manufactured to do just what the article describes -- Create hydrogen, purify air etc. Except the researcher decides to inject himself with his cells to "save them" and standard Sci-Fi goodness ensues.
chemical hypothesis of life unproven (Score:5, Interesting)
The alternative hypothesis is "neo-vitalism" or that is some mysterious substance or force outside of pure chemistry. This was the prevailing hypothesis until well into the 19th century. But it keeps on reappearing in more "scientific" forms today. One statement is the "only living material can produce living matter", even though you can fully explain all the chemistry, physics, and genetics. Another version callled "morphogensis" is that there are "patterns" in lving matter that are transmitted from ancestor to descendent. Yet another version, championed by physicist Roger Penrose is that there is secret unknown physics involved (clarification: he specificiation is attributing human consciousness to a new form of quantum interaction). Still another variation is "holism" or "emergism" which states the totally is greater than the sum of the parts, i.e. a reductionistic explanation is necessarily incomplete.
Note the relation of life to matter is a very old philosophical problem. The ancient Greek story of Pygmalian, the medival Golem, and the 186 year old Frankenstein novel all addressed this issue.
An auxilary problem is artificial intelligence. Its seem obvious that this can be done by us computer geeks. But 55 years of effort have had disappointing results. Some people use similar arguments against artificial life against artificial intelligence.
What a piece of crap (Score:5, Informative)
And the rest of your troll goes downhill from there. "Life begets life" dates back to the mid-19th century, and is an empirical observation that countered hypotheses like maggots spontaneously arising from rotting meat.
Morphogenesis is a genuine scientific concept, but there is nothing mysterious about it. These "patterns" you speak of, they sound strangely like "genes", don't they? Hmm.
I could find no reference to Penrose and a quantum description of human consciousness. This sounds bogus to me, but even if he did seriously make that claim, human consciousness is in no way a prerequisite for life. A bacterium or an earthworm has no human consciousness.
And finally emergism. Certainly, in living organisms, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The whole can replicate, while the parts cannot. Living organisms are emergent systems, but there is nothing mysterious about emergent systems per se.
The relation of life to matter is indeed an old philosophical problem. My own religion (Hinduism) has some very interesting perspectives on the divisions between mind, matter and spirit. However this has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I am not personally qualified to talk about AI and whether are not it is feasible. However, judging from the rest of your post, I doubt your competence in that field of human endeavor as well.
Do this on board the ISS (Score:2)
The Moon would be even safer, of course...
Dammit, we'll justify routine access to space somehow!
Born in the USA (Score:2)
What if it get the missing genes ? (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that small organisms do very well is to swap genes. So what if it escapes, borrows some missing/interesting genes from a passing E. Coli ?
GM crops have been found to swap genes with plants that they weren't supposed to.
Re:Life itself (Score:2, Funny)
If it's female, sounds like the best chance many slashdotters have of getting laid.
Re:This has been done though... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:News: Two famous scientists found dead (Score:4, Insightful)
As I said in another post, no one raises these objections with physics, or chemistry, or math, despite things like, oh, say, the atomic bomb. All scientific research is potentially dangerous. But stopping research because of some vague fear, or some pseudo-philosophical-religious claptrap like "some things are better off left alone" (what things exactly? Be specific) would leave us in the Dark Ages.
Jellyfish don't do scientific research. No jellyfish has ever built an atomic bomb, or engineered a dangerous virus, true. But would you rather be a jellyfish, or a human being?
Re:News: Two famous scientists found dead (Score:2)
Human. Those poisonous sea anemones are a bitch. And rocks suck as pillows.
Re:News: Two famous scientists found dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. The technical name for such meddling is "science".
Re:Hello...? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a parallel to those advocating the joining of competing open-source projects. It won't work to mandate what people work with there, and it won't work here. In both cases, people are working on what they do (or financing the work) because they find it fascinating and important, and no matter what others say they should be doing they will continue doing what they do.
Re:Hello...? (Score:5, Insightful)
The other approach, the molecular approach, is to figure out how life works -- and, of great interest from the medical applications point of view, how it goes wrong -- from the ground up, and try to use that knowledge to build new treatments. That's what these guys are doing. I can almost guarantee you that when a cure for cancer or AIDS is found, it will come from this approach.
Go back to watching NASCAR (Score:4, Interesting)
We have plenty of scientists working on both AIDS and Cancer. If we were to stop all other pursuits until all disease were eradicated our overall standard of living would be much lower due to a lack of innovation in every other field. I suppose just because there's still rabies in the world you think that no scientist should be working on fuel cells, or just because a cure for lupus has been found no one should care a rats ass about developing more efficent supply chain methods...etc.
Re:Did they do this already? (Score:2)
Re:What's so scary? (Score:5, Insightful)
All environments will be new to this critter. That makes the "scary" part, to me anyway, the fact that if this were to escape and survive it would displace something else with absolutely unknown consequences. We are completely dependant on our environment's biology for breathable air and edible food so it's pretty damn important that we don't accidentally (no one would even _consider_ doing it purposely, would they?) introduce some species that will screw it up.
I'm not saying we shouldn't experiment. I'm just saying that everyone should have a healthy dose of fear over this particular kind of experiment.
TW
Re:It's Eviiill! (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the XIX century, we have seen how the crumbling of this "truth" is painfully received among several religions. Since Darwin and Pasteur, every step that closes nears the biotic and anabiotic world is not easy for believers. Many dogmas put living beings in a special place. Besides, humans are put in a more special place. However, the rising of Evolutionism blurred the human-living beings division. Meanwhile while we got closer and closer to the abiotic world, no one could ever mix up inorganic components and bring out an alien crawling outta the lab. So many creationists hang to this last frontier and consider it as "proof" that Life was created by someone. However the new experiments may blur this division to the impossible.