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."
He looked down on his creating and... (Score:5, Funny)
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! (Score:2, Funny)
Life can only be created by our Lord.
This is worse than stem cell research!
I'm calling George W. Bush about this tomorrow. Do you think the executive branch could put through to ban the creation of Life except by God? Those activist judges legislating form the bench might call it unconstitutional, but Justice Scalia has our back.
Very Truely Yours,
Bob Dole
--
Write in George W. Bush. Never switch presidents in a war!
Hello... (Score:5, Funny)
AGTCA
TCGCT "WORLD"
?
Re:Hello... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hello... (Score:5, Funny)
char str[] = "Hello World\n";
FILE * out;
if(out=fopen("/dev/chromosome", "w")) fprintf(out,str);
Apparently it is up to the operating system implementation to provide real time conversions to DNA code bocks from the file stream.
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Humorous or not, I consider this one of the most insightful comments I've read on Slashdot in quite a long time. If you hadn't posted as AC, I even have mod points at the moment, but, so it goes.
Kudos!
Re:Hello... (Score:4, Funny)
"All your base are belong to us"
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They've laid out the plans
They're setting the stage
For the man-made man
We've worked out the kinks
In your DNA
So sayonara, kid
Have a nice day
-Warren Zevon, "Sacrificial Lambs"
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How long until the neoterics emerge? (Score:2)
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There are few more steps (Score:5, Interesting)
So ok, first 3 steps were:
1. figure out there's such a thing as "genetic code"
2. read genetic code
3. write genetic code
There are two more steps:
4. write some genetic code that results in something sensible
5. write some genetic code that results in something sensible, and that's useful for us
Arguably steps 4 and 5 are the hardest possible steps for us to conquer
We'll see "genetic frameworks" with reusable piece that have well known behavior, and genetical development kits that simulate assemblies' features and behavior much faster than doing full-blown atom-by-atom simulation.
Genetical programming will be born
But, oh damn, forget my wild dreams, back to Earth: let's make some drugs and bio-weapons!
Step 6 (Score:2)
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If anyone here knows of such work that explores such issues (and not only the popular genetic profiling issue) please comment
I don't, but I'm willing to bet it's in Charlie Stross's file of future ideas to explore...
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Funny)
So if humans do genetic programming, it's obviously designed. Otherwise it's random, mindless mutations, that just somehow happened over the course of billions of years. What useful code for computers has ever come about by any other means beside a human mind? So now human minds contemplate writing genetic code, yet those same human minds try to make themselves and the rest of us believe that the original genetic code did not originate in someone's mind, God's mind. Indeed, God expressing Himself through the Apostle Paul gives us His assessment in Chapter 1 of the Letter to the Romans:
"But they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools"
In other news:
Along with the "Creation of Life" some other patents were issued recently for "Cold Fusion", "Anti-Gravity" and a "Time-Travel" device dubbed "Stargate". Patents are also pending for "Eternal Youth" and "Perpetual Motion".
Grossly misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the above is creating "artificial life". DNA is the life created by someone or something else. Inserting a DNA into a cell is not creating "artificial life". The cell is already a life -- it is the life created by someone or something else. He only modifies the life. He didn't create it.
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Call me when they create the cell to which the artificially created DNA will be inserted to, from scratch.
Re:Grossly misleading (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Grossly misleading (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, just why do you think the scientists are so hell-bent on creating artificial life to their specifications, mechanical or biological ?
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Please stop lying. You will not falsify the theory of evolution by wrongly attributing the process of abiogenesis to it. You will also not falsify any biological concepts by making a gross misstatement of an abiogenesis hypothesis.
Re:Grossly misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll be waiting for this call forever. The structure even of a single cell is immensely complex. I mean, we share over 50% DNA with *plants*. Half of our DNA is just the "core OS" for running a live organism. It's not a small thing.
Scientists won't start building cells from scratch, they'll just tweak existing ones more and more while they understand the exact mechanisms completely.
You'll be long dead before we see fully artificial, rebuilt from scratch cells.
I gotta ask you though. What % of code rewrite would you accept on an existing organism, before you call it artificial life.
1%? That amount of changes could turn a monkey into man, or man into monkey.
5%? They could start with a cat, and end with a dolphin.
Name your numbers.
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But you can't claim you've "Created Life" by modifying an existing instance.
Re:Grossly misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
So did Netscape or the Mozilla Foundation "create" FireFox 2?
I agree, we haven't reached the point where we can fairly call it "created life". But this one step, more than anything since Pasteur, represents a major step forward. The ability to invoke a breakpoint on a running cell, replace its code with a custom gene sequence, and continue execution, means we can now probe the rest of the cellular machinery with unprecedented efficiency.
The GP's point aside, I think this one step means we'll see a fully artificial cell within a decade or two - Certainly within our lifetimes... Presuming, of course, that the military doesn't create and release (accidentally or deliberately doesn't matter) the "perfect bug" before then.
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.
MRS GREN (Score:3, Informative)
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And, if I made robots, capable of building copies of themselves, and of seeking out and absorbing energy from their surroundings, would that count as life? If yes, it doesn't sound that far off.
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Having said that, one of the reasons a viru
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Provided that the parts they used were never part of any other robot or machine. Any parts composed of anything more than some or all of the 92 or so elements could not be used. Life takes mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, along with some of the others to build all organisms. Your robot would have to do the same or employ a hierarchy of robots that could do this. Also, if you believe in evolution, the application of external
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All fundamental particles are just a sets of characteristics. If it has certain characteristics, it's a photon, if another, it's a proton, yet another, it's an electron. The same is true of everything formed from them. You, for example, have a set of characteristics: your skin color, shape, hair color, eye color, tendency to post
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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 ca
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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Actually, there's some work on artificial ribosomes. So it may happen even faster I think...
love those mobile goalposts (Score:3, Interesting)
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And it has good potential for harm. But that is true for any new tech and it's always been this way.
Anyway the more we advance in this field, the more apparent will be the abyss that separates us from $DEITY's realm. Virtual artificial life, where somebody devises a set of rules for a virtual world that ends up with entities of such world being self-aware (for some definitions of awareness), would be quite more useful from a philosophical POV than these experiments, but this might help
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God: "Okay, lets have a contest."
Scientist reaches for some dirt... God: "Oh No! You go make your own dirt!"
Replicating a complex acid (the A in DNA) is NOT creating life.
Depends how you flip the coin. (Score:2, Interesting)
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There's an interesting perspective that cells, collecting into complex organisms, with strength, agility and intelligence, are nothing more than DNA's way to improve its own chances of reproducing.
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Actually, nobody is anywhere near making even a moderately complex protein, let alone a living cell, from totally non-living material. We can take complex molecules, produced by something that was at one point alive and assemble these into other compounds. So far, life only comes from life. Nobody has ever even come remotely close to demonstrating otherwise.
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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MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Funny)
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The man is a prima donna, prone to exaggerate, self-serving in every way.
And yes, he has merely created some DNA. Routinely done using PCR, etc. He has simply reversed reading techniques to writing techniques. And as pointed out by other posters, he has commandeered the machinery of other cells.
In summary, this is a long, long way from 'creating
Sorry for misreading... (Score:2)
But I like it better this way B-)
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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.
Men's Health carried an article earlier this afternoon (but I don't see it now on Google News, where I first found it) that states:
Despite the reports, a spokeswoman for the offices where Venter works states that the Guardian Unlimited "
Is this the best use we can think of? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a pity that one of the first things that we think of when making such a step forward is 'How can we use this to kill our fellow man?'. OK, so global warming and new drugs are also in there, but which one would you bet on will receive the big government funding?
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Science and Warfare have gone hand in hand since the beginnings of technology. An advance in technology almost always translates into an advance in the ability to wage war. Those that are rich and powerful because of war (every government ever) know this and often give a lot of support and funding to science. DARPA is an easy example. As this relationship is very old
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It has to go much deeper than mere technology. God had put in writing, centuries ago, where the problem lies:
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things , and desperately wicked: who can know it?
He wrote this in the context of man's desire to be independent of his Creator. Only a change of a person's core attitude toward God and then toward the other creations of God, especi
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No, I think it goes more like this: "Wow, this has a lot of potential. We can use it for all sorts of things. It's also possible that someone who wants to indiscriminently kill lots of people or hurry along some pet apocalypse might want to use this as a weapon, too, so we'd better understand what it means to approach it that way, the better to be prepared for evidenc
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You have it backward. The first thought is: How can my fellow man use this to kill me ?
As well as it should, considering the history of human race...
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fork! (Score:5, Funny)
He took the source for a bacterium, he forked it, and made a newer, cleaner version. He is about to start testing. His version does not yet actually do anything, but if all goes well it will be a great foundation for new and usefull stuff.
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Yeah, we're forked indeed (Score:2)
Presumably this new Generated Pseudo-Life (GP-L) will be viral in nature, seeking to beat down the monopoly stranglehold held by the entrenched biocommunity of today and replace it with something that, while having no market
Quite an Important Question (Score:2)
Re:Quite an Important Question (Score:4, Insightful)
What about electricity itself? Electricity gave us the electric chair and modern mechanized warfare, It also has given us massive advances in medicine and technology.
This discovery will be no different. It furthers our understanding of our entire biology, getting us closer, inch-by-inch, to being able to cure all diseases, bring back extinct organisms, and likely usher in molecular computers and nano-machines that can self-replicate and help us fix the damage we've done to earth. I've no doubt it can also be used to kill all humans. I'm confident that we as a species will have matured enough by the time this technology becomes useful that our imminent demise won't be our top concern.
Well..I am for it (Score:2, Funny)
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.
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Re:Since I love being pedantic (Score:4, Insightful)
Has someone got a link to a more scientific-oriented explanation? Current details are a bit scarce to me.
Global Warming??? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the kind of claim that tells me that he's fishing for funding, nothing more.
Super-Bacteria (Score:4, Insightful)
Bah, why am I so worried, I'm sure they will keep it safely contained like they have for rice [washingtonpost.com]
and I am creating a new work of literature (Score:5, Interesting)
From just a fast read of the article, I think the claim "creating" a new life is a bit exaggerated.
It's pared down from the genome of a pre-existing species and probably permuted the organisation of the genes on the chromosomes, therefore not much "creation" was involved, they just figured out what genes are not essentially for cell/organism viability and removed them. Granted, a LOT of work had to have been done to stitch together the final artificial chromosome, but still, I think it would be more correct to say it's an artificially _modified_ chromosome rather than created.
Gene therapy labs often play with the HIV virus, by taking out the nasty bits and put in replacement genes, to study whether it is an effective delivery system.
Scientists have difficulty predicting function and structure of known/natural proteins/genes, let alone making new ones. However, gene modification is very common, for example, GFP (green fluorescent protein) is commonly modified to fluoresce other colours. And genome paring is also pretty common, there was a group that removed 5 MB (megabases) from mouse genome and the mice still looked and behaved normally _in_the_lab_, can you claim that they were a new species of mouse?
Last I heard, the Mayo lab (http://www.mayo.caltech.edu/research.html) has created a completely novel gene which produced a protein that folded as they predicted it would. I haven't followed up on the progress since then.
Sure, it took tremendously amount of effort, but it's still exaggeration. An example, perhaps a bit unfair, but it's like saying people who pared down Windows installations by removing non-essential files are "creating" new operating systems.
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In terms of the design that's true - he cut bits out rather than designed new bits (that will come next).
But in terms of building it, it seems it's accurate to say he created it, and certainly that it's artificial. The article says he built the DNA "from laboratory chemicals" which I assume means it was synthesized (not the first to do it - the polio virus has already been synthesized from raw chemicals) r
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Yeah, the few articles that were on Google News when I read about this earlier this afternoon were a bit vague on exactly what role those laboratory chemicals played. The statements do not exclude the possibility that the chemicals were used merely to snip off the undesired code, reducing it to the few hundred bases that will eventually be transferred to a bacterial cell.
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No, it's like taking some Linux and Max OSX files and installing those in Windows. If done right, it might produce a Windows with some of the best characteristics of those OS. Immunity to worms and spyware might be one of these. However there may also be some other effects, such as certain applications crashing or doing strange things.
Playing God? (Score:2, Insightful)
"My colleague Hammie Smith likes to answer: 'We don't play.'"
There's no denying the man has good ideas, and that this one has enormous potential. Unfortunately his egoism seemingly avaricious nature have put off many in the scientific community. Let's hope these factors don't slow this important development.
He should patent his wording as well ... (Score:2, Insightful)
CC.
This would only be a hack. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if Venter made the overhyped claim but it will surely come back to bite science. Creationists and other voodoo merchants will surely seize on this as an example of scientists claiming far too much, and use it as ammunition to discredit science in the eyes of their followers (I started by typing "foolowers" but how many people nowadays know what it means when you write [stet] after a happy mistype?).
Nobody can claim to create artificial life until there is a complete self-reproducing unit built from inorganic chemicals from the ground up. I don't know how long it will be before that happens, (diminishing resources may mean it never happens - we may have much more urgent tasks for scientists over the next 50 years or so.) but this isn't it. It looks like it is an important technical advance, but it is on a level with, say, the development of the CNC machine, and the claims in the media are about as accurate as if someone had written "With the development of the CNC workstation, we have created self-reproducing robots in the laboratory.
Re:This would only be a hack. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have heard of an eventual goal of creating a completely artificial eukaryote by some bio-researchers. The idea here is to try and figure out what the absolute minimum requirements would be necessary in terms of a genetic sequence that would still allow for self-replication. Sort of a biological equivalent of a RISC processor or perhaps even something of a biological equivalent of the Brainf*** programming language. Such an organism would have profound implications and even value in terms of biological research, where you could test different genetic sequences in a simple but known environment that wouldn't be fighting with billions of years of genetic evolution. In "the wild", such a simple organism would also face incredible competition and would likely be killed by nearly everything it would encounter, so mad monsters from a lab experiment would not likely cause many problems... at least with the basic A-life eukaroyte.
I agree that this is something that is decades away from being developed, but things such as writing a genetic sequence is certainly an important step to creating such living things.
The Next Step (Score:2)
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More likely as an example of far too little. If scientists would succeed in making life from non-life, it would show that it takes a lot of thought, not some random processes over time. It would show that it took even more thought to invent life from scratch, rather than just figuring out how to copy that which already exists. It would greatly strengthen the theory of intelligent
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
He didn't create it... (Score:4, Funny)
An analogy for Slashdotters (Score:2, Insightful)
Some people under-estimate the potential significance by saying that we've been able to insert new genes in organisms for quite some time. That is true, but it misses the point, because for the first time the complete genome (operating system code) can be replaced
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Except that in living systems, the hardware is built by and depends on the software. It requires enzymes to construct DNA, which carries instruction code how to make enzymes. So which came first, the enzymes that make the code carrier DNA possible, or the DNA which carries the instructions for making enzymes?
It's like building a computer that makes computers with disk drives. The computer itself has a disk drive that contains the instru
IT'S NOT A CHROMOSOME (Score:3, Insightful)
WHERE ARE MY BIOCHEM GEEKS???
They just stitched together a giant friggin plasmid, that's it.
If they made a chromosome, great, that would be awesome because no one can do that yet, but it's a plasmid, sure, a fully working one, but still just a loop of DNA.
They educated people writing these articles...
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It's also not really "artificial life" (as has been pointed out by many others).
It is pure Venter - a good idea - more from an engineering standpoint than pure science, but important nonetheless, hyped to the max, poorly explained by a "journalist".
This isn't artificial life. (Score:3, Informative)
tagging genius (Score:2)
Pictures of the inside of a cell (Score:2)
alternative headline: "Venter hacks mycoplasma" (Score:2, Insightful)
If the announcement is in the form of
Would you kindly... (Score:2)
Reminds me of the old creationist joke (Score:3, 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!"
Here's a fun one... (Score:2)
Re:Life... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting question. If a genetic sequence is invented and patented by scientist, could a natural mutation in a human being leading to the same sequence lead to patent infringement?
I guess the answer is pending, and so is the patent reform to shape it.
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can't have a patent (Score:2)
This is joke, however lame....
Re:life (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I get scared - Movie plot! (Score:2)