US Scientist Creates Artificial Life 253
Joshocar writes "The sometimes-controversial US scientist Craig Venter has announced that he has created artificial life. Venter stated that it is 'a very important philosophical step in the history of our species ... We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.' In the lab, Venter was able to construct and write genetic code from laboratory chemicals. The next step is to insert this code into a cell, which has already been demonstrated in the past. This ability to write genetic code could result in new ways to combat global warming and new drugs, but it could also lead to new bio-weapons."
not quite .... (Score:5, Informative)
2) It was not him but his team.
3) His team has not actually created the life form in question, it's just a stripped down copy of an existing life form.
4) His team has only made a copy of the chromosome, the other parts of cellular machinary come from an existing organism.
So the summary should read
Craig Venter is expected to announce that his team has created an artificial copy of a bacterium chomosome. The arficial chromosome, if all goes well, will be installed in a cell, and will take over its machinery, and effectivelly begin living.
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Since I love being pedantic (Score:5, Informative)
Also note that this isn't actually synthetic life, just a synthetic genome. The components which translate that genome into a functional organism (i.e. the cell and it's structures) were not created. But this is none the less a great leap forward, and I'm sure the resulting findings and work to come from this will unlock vast possibilities, as well as elucidate some currently unknown processes and problems in molecular biology.
Speaking of possibilities, let's also try not to get too caught up in the nonsense here. This stuff about combating global warming and building drugs and/or bioweapons is just idle speculation, and could be applied to pretty much any kind of molecular biology research. This is just one step, albeit a big one, towards a possible larger goal.
Re:Grossly misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Do you consider a virus to be alive? It's a borderline case, but some people at least would say yes.
The Polio virus has already been synthesized from scratch from raw chemicals - feed chemicals into a machine and get a virus out the other end. No need to sprinkle any magic "life" pixie dust on it.
This isn't artificial life. (Score:3, Informative)
MRS GREN (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hello... (Score:1, Informative)
"A fifth pyrimidine base, called uracil (U), usually takes the place of thymine in RNA and differs from thymine by lacking a methyl group on its ring. Uracil is not usually found in DNA, occurring only as a breakdown product of cytosine, but a very rare exception to this rule is a bacterial virus called PBS1 that contains uracil in its DNA." Wikipedia
And we are talking bacteria here.
Re:Grossly misleading (Score:3, Informative)
That is pure, unadulterated BS, a bald faced lie. NOBODY has ever made even a virus from all non-living components. They have taken chemicals that originated from life and combined these to make other chemicals which some have called life. To truly make life, ALL parts thereof MUST come from chemicals that were never produced by anything that was previously alive.
The definition of life is not clear cut. At minimum to be called alive, an organism must be able to reproduce itself and at some level at least, be self-repairing if damaged. Viruses do meet these two specs.
Nobody has ever demonstrated life coming from non-life.
Re:Grossly misleading (Score:3, Informative)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Grossly misleading (Score:1, Informative)
They did not create the virus from "scratch" (non-biological sources). They used provided gene sequences. These gene sequences were almost certainly obtained from other viruses.