Scientists take step to making synthetic life

Source: Yahoo News

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have taken a first step toward making synthetic life by transferring genetic material from one bacterium into another, transforming the second microbe into a copy of the first.

They intend to use their technique to custom-design bacteria to perform functions such as producing artificial fuel or cleaning up toxic waste, the researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

"This is equivalent to changing a Macintosh computer to a PC by inserting a new piece of software," Craig Venter, a genome pioneer who now heads his own institute in Rockville, Maryland, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

"I think eventually we could make artificial cells," Venter added. "This is a first step."

Venter has been trying for years to create a microbe from scratch. This is not quite it, but his team re-programmed one species of bacteria by adding in the genetic material from a closely related species.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070628/ts_nm/genes_synthetic_dc

tricking the bacteria to produce everything from insulin to vaccines.

It's a far cry from that to building a cell from the protein chains that primordial goo creates in hours. It took the earth about three billion years to accomplish it.

Evidence points to cellular life developing very quickly on earth, only about 250 million years after the earth's crust formed, or about 4.25 billion years ago.

Single celled life dominated this planet for far longer than the entire history and evolution of multicellular life.

> It's a far cry from that to building a cell from the
> protein chains that primordial goo creates in hours.

That work is going on too. There's at least one project
under way to construct, DNA base-pair by DNA base-pair,
a completely artificial bacterium built from ordinary
chemicals by humans.

In that case, we really would be creating life from scratch.

'Wonder what the god-mongers will say when that happens?

Tesha

"Wonder what the god-mongers will say when that happens?"

I know what they will say. They'll say: oh yeah, but you're just COPYING the code that God already created. You didn't WRITE it yourself, or invent the language. That's what they'll say.

I'd appreciate it if everyone would ignore Venter, he's a grandiose narcissist who embarrasses many scientists. The fundamental questions about how life works haven't been answered to anyone's satisfaction and won't be for a good century yet.

Sure, we can manipulate life in some crude ways, but compared to any machine that engineers have ever devised, the simplest living cell is enormously subtle and complex, the ultimate in nano-technology.

Life has had billions of years to become as compact and efficient as possible down the the atomic scale, and to take advantage of every possible subtle law of physics.

Which is lucky for me, else I'd be out of a job! :-)

However, he has been successful by having a talented staff and they have managed to get their findings through the peer review process.

Now we are a long way away from "designer bacteria", but I think we are much closer to random synthetic life.

The aura of peer review sort of wears off once you realize how much crap they publish in Science, believe me.

I'm working in a field which is not unrelated to Venters own and let me tell you, we are a LONG way from anything that could be properly called "synthetic life".

Here's an analogy for what his group's done:

Imagine that the Planet of the Apes has come true, and we're a bunch of cavemen with access to ancient cars, trying to understand how a modern internal combustion engine works.

After a century of painstaking research, Professor Thog has finally taken the engine from a Toyota Camry, successfully put it into a Ford, and started the "new car" up.

The next day Professor Thog holds a press conference and announces that cavemankind is only weeks away from mass producing our own cars.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Craig Venter...

The guy has an ego the size of Jupiter and the whole patent thing is ridiculous.

As for how close we are, if you're working in that field, then I defer to you. I'm just going by the research I've seen published to date.

Just consider that for even the simplest form of life, a tiny aquatic organism called Mycoplasma, we have NO idea what one-third of the 450 genes necessary for its survival are doing, and a VERY limited understanding of many of the others.

And this tiny single cell, an object one-hundredth the width of a human hair, is at LEAST as complex as a Boeing 767, in terms of the number of parts, the interactions between parts, and the mechanisms by which it's controlled.

And most life on Earth is MUCH more complex than that.

Like I said, I'll be employed for a long time yet ;-)

When I see stories like this, it reminds me of Jeff Goldblum's character from Jurassic Park. "Your scientists were so pre-occupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think if they should."

It's the crude manipulation of microbes. Big difference. We're not even close to knowing how to "create" life.

More escaped Bio Microbes gone haywire. :eyes: