Florida Lab Gets Pregnant 149
Synthetic Biology, a relatively new field, is seeking to find out what happened to a bunch of chemicals to make them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating, and evolution. A Florida lab is showing some of the most promising advancements in this direction with their AEGIS (Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System) experiment. "AEGIS is not self-sustaining, at least not yet, and with 12 DNA building blocks -- as opposed to the usual four -- there's little chance it will be confused with natural life. Still, Benner is encouraged by the results. 'It's evolving. It's doing what we designed it to do,' said Benner, a biochemist with the Gainesville, Fla.-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front."
eh (Score:1, Funny)
Honey, we're pregnant.
AEGIS has been in commercial use for years (Score:5, Funny)
KFC rolled theirs out years ago.
grey goo (Score:2)
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Green goo actually, or maybe grayish-green goo would be more appropriate.
On a more realistic note, those 12 artificial nucleotides they seem to have put in there probably aren't found in the environment make it unlikely anything to come out of it will get very far.
I do of course realize that "probably" is an issue for some people who seem convinced that any possibility, no matter how small, when it comes to biological nightmare scenarios is an absolute certainty (specifically biology ones, they're more rati
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You know that it only affects conductors that are, at least, a few meters wide, don't you?
If an EMP has some impact on grey goo it will be making their lives easier once it destroy our machines.
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Any sort of creation we make in the lab right now will ultimately be weaker than any successful microbe.
Green goos already exist, they cause common colds.
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I think viruses are generally crystalline.
Grey goo and hubris (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because artificial machines may be able to deal with a much wider set of chemical reactions than we can. Also because they are inteligently designed and, thus, can be way better optimized than we are.
I'm not very concerned about it destroying the humanity, but I can see how grey goo may disrupt other species.
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Ok, disrupt isn't a good word here.
My point was that, as we get better on it, we may become able to outcompete nature, and even replace life entirely
Of course, that doesn't apply to this specific experiment. (Nor anything I'm expecting to happen at the next 50 years...)
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My point about humanity being safe is because as soon as we are able to do a better fitted competing being, we'll quite probably also be able to improve ourselves to the point of overturning this competitor.
I place no bet at the robustness of any kind of organism.
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What makes you think a T-Cell can eat a nanomachine? Can you eat a laptop? Chew it? Swallow it? Didn't think so.....
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Interesting. I always wondered what caused the buildup of tissue in asbestos cases.
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By the standard definition, grey goo would be a synthetic life form.
many uses (Score:3, Funny)
In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front
Oh yes! Like holding the world hostage!! Now where can I get some mind-controlling synthetic life forms? (don't forget the insulin dependence [xkcd.org]).
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Synthesize this [youtube.com]
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I won't believe its alive until ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I won't believe its alive until ... (Score:5, Funny)
Do you mean a white scientist with a lab coat, a scientist in a white lab coat, or a white scientist coated in a lab?
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None of the above. He meant a scientist coated in white lab.
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obviously, a scientist that an albino retriever leg humped
Nerds + genetic-engineering = ...boobs (Score:5, Funny)
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That's (Score:2, Funny)
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You'll need to adopt two of them for that.
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Pffft. There are already synthetic boobies.
Aim lower.
Re:Nerds + genetic-engineering = ...boobs (Score:5, Funny)
Pffft. There are already synthetic boobies.
Aim lower.
Synthetic boobies for really old ladies?
Um, guys.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that statement eating itself?
Re:Um, guys.... (Score:5, Funny)
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What they MEAN to say is: we never came up with a design, we don't know what it's doing (besides fiendishly difficult quadratic equations) and we want to pass this off as deliberate so we get our next grant cheque.
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Subject confusion I think. They designed the system to produce evolving artificial bugs, which are the ones doing the evolving. Also they set the system up to evolve (design), but they arent' directing the evolution?
Re:Um, guys.... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it is proof that the ID vs. evolution argument is bogus.
Something can both evolve AND be the product of the will of somebody. Also, for a hypothetical eternal god POV, not bound by time, there is no "let's setup something and see how it evolves". It is more like "Let's do it, done.", even if it involves uncertainty, free will, evolution: all of those concepts are bound to time, a god is not.
A more classic proof of the argument being bogus is the fact that evolution is not a dogma and ID is not an acceptable scientific theory (unless you have scientific proof of a god to back it up, which slashdot has not reported AFAIK :) )
A cynic proof of the argument being bogus is: it doesn't solve anything, it needlessly divides people, it is perfect for the media to fill up pages instead of giving people useful information.
No ruling class ever liked their sheep to get too smart.
Of course, having proved ID independent from evolution and doesn't mean either is true.
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I mean no offense here, but I think you're confused about what ID is, and what its purpose is. It's much easier of you just assume ID = Creationism and the attempt to get said Creationism into public schools. See here: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District#Decision [wikipedia.org]
ID is not merely the belief in a god that could have designed the universe (plenty of theists acknowledge evolution. The entire Catholic church, for instance). ID is dependent on the creation stories in Ge
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> ID is dependent on the creation stories in Genesis, and is strictly anti-evolution.
"for dust you are and to dust you will return" seems evolutionary enough to me :D but i digress. Thank you for your comment.
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Yeah, I always wondered about that one as well. God breathing life into mud sounds a lot like abiogenesis to me. But good luck trying to tell a young earth creationist or a flat-earther that.
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This is all correct. For instance, we know that ID in the Dover case is creationism dressed up as science, because the textbook originally advocated by the IDers was about Creationism in it's early drafts and was changed after the earlier court cases banning Creationism from being taught in schools. The diff was the cornerstone of the complaint's case.
We know that this is being done to introduce Chrisitanity into public schools, because those supporting ID, the Discovery Institute, said as much in the Wed [wikipedia.org]
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You may be right. They surely have not given up. But I feel like when I look at the history of the movement, I see them trying again and again to convince school boards and getting slapped again and again by the courts. No one's buying the name changes, either. For instance, the most recent tactic is "teach the controversy" but Judge Jones said in the Kitzmiller ruling, "This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard."
I'm not sure they'll ever give up, and the fact that we have such vocal Luddit
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Now I say God isn't just not bound by time, it's also not bound by logic. In fact, logic does not exist, the logic we see is just an illusion produced by God. (NOT FALSE) is not (TRUE), (TRUE OR FALSE) is not TRUE, and 1 + 1 in binary is not 10. Nothing is true, only God is true. So there, argue against that.
Of course, I don't really believe in creationism either. But it seems to me it's fruitless to argue against those peo
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Not my fault (Score:1, Redundant)
Don't blaim me! I thought she was on the pill!
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Seconded.
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Mod parent up, and enjoy this best of craigslist post about paternity -- "Vasectomy: $400. Speechless look on her face: priceless." [craigslist.org]
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Ah, slashdot. Where astounding technical brilliance meets an understanding of gender relations based on "Two and a Half Men".
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Don't blaim me! I thought she was on the pill!
Yeah, here I was reading the title and anticipating a flood of "HOW LABBY IS FORMED" comments.
Excuse me, (Score:1)
Sounds like Intelligent Design (Score:3, Interesting)
For the sake of argument, if scientists start "guiding" synthetic life through "evolution" in the lab, isn't that ID?
If so, does it boost the ID argument for *our* creation?
Hmmm......
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Only if you're trying to make the argument that humans guided the evolution of humans. It's about as logical an argument as I've ever heard from the ID crowd, but it's still pretty stupid.
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Or aliens, we could have been some alien high school science fair project that went wrong, so they shot the "Grey goo" to Earth and it evolved into the lifeforms we now have.
Would it be interesting to find out that we created ourselves via AEGIS and shot it back in time via a time travel paradox?
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Evolution is simply put " change in the frequency of the genetic makeup of a population over time". How is this not evolution?
Methinks you've spent so much time trying to justify your Creationist tendencies by calling scientists "elitists" that you actually have no idea what they're talking about.
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"Why not go so far out on a limb that it breaks under our (mankind) massive ego a
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"there are so many assumptions made with evolution."
As opposed to the incredible massive amount of assumptions and refutation of logic made with creationism.
"Evolution from a biological perspective does not include any design whatsoever so a scientist designing chemicals to self-replicate is not evolution; it does not evolve"
Try reading the article first. Self replication is not even mentioned or referred to. The scientist in the article is quoted as saying "It's evolving" without elaborating on it. So ho
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"automatically assume a) that the poster has no experience with the field"
His entire post makes it abundantly clear that he would never have anything to do with any of the subjects I listed. There was no "automatic assumption" about it. If there was the slightest hint of any understanding of science on his/her part, I wouldn't have stated it.
"Where are we to believe that anything could be derived from anything"
Well, the last I checked we were in the year 2009 CE, not 2009 BCE. And if we actually believed
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1) Good for you Creationism is not science. You can't discover anything with it. It is religion. That's ok. We let people practice religion. We don't teach it as science in our public schools.
2) Yes, it is correct science to ask how chemicals enabled evolution. As a result of such questions we know how fairly complicated chemicals can form from simple situations.
The other of this is our understanding of the various nucleic acids. This has benefited everything from forensics to biological science to m
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No more than breeding cows or strains of wheat is an argument for ID.
World domination (Score:2)
So when it starts reproducing itself, how long will it take to stop it?
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No kidding. I'm quite thankful that Aegis [wikipedia.org] is not yet self-replicating.
Re:World domination (Score:5, Interesting)
Anything to come out of those vats would probably need most of the 12 artifical nucleotides, which aren't found in any apreciable quantity outside of the vat. If any gets out it would quickly starve. Not to mention that depending on the conditions that they are evolving under, there might be more immediate problems for anything escaping. Early life evolved under anerobic conditions, oxygen is pretty toxic to cells. They're probably generating these things under anerobic conditions to mimic what were thought to be early conditions of the earth and to maybe encourage things to start growing. I would expect that any bugs growing in this system would be poisoned by oxygen once outside pretty rapidly, much as bacteria from early earth would. Also temperatures are probably much higher in the vats.
Since the vats are -probably- extremely rich in all 12 artificial nucleotides, devoid of oxygen, and very warm in all places, there wouldn't be any advantage or reason for the bugs to evolve ways of overcoming those conditions. There'd be no reason for them to develop ways of making their own artificial nucleotides since they're provided. In fact that would probably be a detriment, since any way of converting one of the natural 4 would be costly to the cell in terms of energetics and would have no gain, they'd quickly be out-proliferated by their bretheren who don't waste energy on things like that. In other words, once stepping out of the vat, they'd be presented with an extremely harsh environment they're totally unprepared for.
I am of course making some assumptions there. I guess we can't rule it out entirely, but there are millions of unlikely apocalypses you can't completely rule out.
Re:World domination (Score:5, Interesting)
I think those are not unreasonable assumptions, providing they're maintained in that environment. The more interesting (and much more nasty) experiment would be to let the critters breed for many generations, letting the fittest gain control of their little ecosystem, then slowly introduce elements of the external environment in, making the habitat *less* supportive. Eventually, and I'm sure this would take a long time (several generations of scientists, say), you would produce an organism potentially capable of surviving outside the vat.
At that point, of course, it would still have to put up with 4 billion years worth of evolution on the outside, with organisms of considerably more complexity in finding and utilizing food sources. A good example are nylon-eating bacteria [wikipedia.org]. In the space of no more than forty years, a population of bacteria learned how to eat a food that hadn't even existed prior to 1935.
Any organism we make in a vat would, I suspect, not last terribly long on the outside.
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You could probably do that in the lab in less then a decade.
Re:World domination (Score:4, Funny)
Particularly in the Deep South, where barbeque is almost a religion on its own.
People for Eating Tasty Animals, anyone?
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Interesting, your post echoed mine but you got modded up faster than me...
I agree. I do not think that these bacteria would last long outside the AGEIS system. ;-P
In seriousness, I think the 8 artificial nucleotide dependance is a pretty high hurdle. Evolving to the point of being able to make all 12 nucleotides from the natural 4 or other natural building blocks is possible, but I'm doubtful that it would ever be competitive with bacteria that don't bother doing that. Lowering the amount of artificial n
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To quote Dr. Ian Malcom: "Life. Finds. A. Way."
It was almost like Jeff Goldblum was channeling Shatner, but acting him as more human than he was when not acting.
ivan
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To quote Dr. Ian Malcom: "Life. Finds. A. Way."
If given enough time it might. I'm reassured by the fact that after more than 4 billion years, life on Earth apparently has yet to leave it's much much bigger vat. For that reason, I propose we don't leave AGEIS running for more than a billion years.
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The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here staggers me.
Don't you see the danger inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever witnessed, yet you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun.
If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whet
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Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever witnessed, yet you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun.
I do?!? Gee, I thought I was just idly commenting on someone who was doing what you just described. Or are you talking about my... er... extracirricular genetic experimentation? That's really none of your buisness and off-topic.
If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously.
And slowly (at least on the timescale for a human life). Again, how long has it taken us to colonize space? How long did it take life to conquer dry land? Was it weeks, years, or millions of years? I think we'll get bored with AGEIS long before a warlike tribe of superhumans c
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Well, that's so short and pithy that it MUST be true. Tell that to the dinosaurs (keeping in mind that Jurrasic park hasn't actually happened yet.)
OT: online news (Score:3, Interesting)
Researchers in a Florida laboratory are working with the most asic building blocks of life to try and understand how biology first arose on Earth â" and how it might appear on other planets.
Seriously, I know these pages are assembled by software from other sources but don't they have spell checking built into them? Lots of otherwise good news sources I read have stupid typos in their online versions. Right now firefox is underlining "asic" for me, pointing out the mistake. It seems like every second article has something like this. It just seems so easy to fix. I wonder why that isn't done.
Re:OT: online news (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly if I made artificial life, I'd put it on an ASIC. Otherwise you'd just have too many discrete components and general purpose things to get it in a tiny package.
Then again I'm an EE, and I equate everything biological to the word "slimy" in my mind. Mechanical life for the win...
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Artificial life on an ASIC? How quaint a notion. Artificial life would work better in an FPGA so as to be able to reconfigure large portions of itself. (Although I will of course grant that a custom FPGA may be used, perhaps with some special hard coded logic, which may make it an ASIC if the result is not sufficently general purpose.)
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Yeah she was wearing a little pink number and she was HOT!
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naming... (Score:1)
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A virus that infects single cells which have 8 nucleotides I don't is a virus I laugh at.
How can !self sustaining=evolving? (Score:1)
where x=fiction
Alive! (Score:1)
I wonder if a science lab (Score:2)
can sue a scientist for child support and alimony for getting her pregnant?
Am I the one only who thought about dogs... (Score:2)
I mean breeding Labradors is not really big news. Even in Florida.
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welcome (Score:1)
Interesting statement about evolution. (Score:1, Interesting)
> 'It's evolving. It's doing what we designed it to do...'
It's almost like a scientist is saying that evolution can take place as the result of an intelligent design process.
I'm sure I'll get flamed for saying that.
Things like, "Certainly not this evolution, and certainly no intelligence could be great enough to have foreseen it." After all, we're number one. The smartest. No possibility of anything greater.
After all, extrapolation is only for climate data, and then, only on hot days.
Florida Lab Gets Pregnant (Score:1)
Send up a flare (Score:2, Interesting)
when they trounce cell theory. A bunch of chemicals which preferentially catalyze feedstock to produce identical/similar chemicals is interesting, and very difficult to do from scratch, but I want CELLS! Self enclosed systems.
I suppose cells are not really needed for life, but it seems pretty clear that they provide certain advantages, especially in terms of not just getting washed away.
On the topic of ID: just because there is a chemical reaction that seems to be approaching the fuzzy definition of life
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Viruses aren't cells. Of course, not everyone would call a virus "life", but of course they're not exactly non-life either.
There's also psions...it's interesting how much of a gray area there is between life and non-life. These guys are clearly having a lot of fun playing around in that gray area.
As for ID (sigh), it's a rejection of *evolution* theory based on Christian theology. This research seems like it has more implications for abiogenesis than it does for evolution. Also...don't do them the service o
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I didn't realize that life could be built from blocks of Application Specific Integrated Circuits. Hmmmm.
Actually that is how I always expected New Life to come about.
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intelligently designed
Well, I guess we know which camp you're in.
Re:A first (Score:4, Funny)
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An intelligently designed biological system capable of evolution.
Gee, that's never been done before.
But there do seem to be evolved biological systems capable of intelligent design.
That sounds pretty similar, it's gotta count for something.
Re:A first (Score:4, Funny)
Diary of creating new life
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Where are the tax cuts Obama promised for 95% of us?
AEGIS ate the economy, so there's no money left.
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Am I the only one that assumed the CHOPS program cured homosexuality via traumatic castration?