Posted on 05/20/2010 10:39:53 AM PDT by mgstarr
Scientists have turned inanimate chemicals into a living organism in an experiment that raises profound questions about the essence of life.
Craig Venter, the US genomics pioneer, announced on Thursday that scientists at his laboratories in Maryland and California had succeeded in their 15-year project to make the world’s first “synthetic cells” – bacteria called Mycoplasma mycoides.
“We have passed through a critical psychological barrier,” Dr Venter told the FT. “It has changed my own thinking, both scientifically and philosophically, about life and how it works.”
The bacteria’s genes were all constructed in the laboratory “from four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information on a computer,” he said.
The research – published online by the journal Science – was hailed as a landmark by many independent scientists and philosophers.
“Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into its destiny,” said Julian Savulescu, ethics professor at Oxford University. “This is a step towards ... creation of living beings with capacities and natures that could never have naturally evolved.”
The synthetic bacteria have 14 “watermark sequences” attached to their genome – inert stretches of DNA added to distinguish them from their natural counterparts. They behaved and divided in lab dishes like natural bacteria.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
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!”
WOW! If true this could be extremely dangerous.
Yeah, right, and I just turned my oatmeal into a hamburger.
But seriously, I just ain't buyin' it. Any number of things could corrupt or mess up their experiment.
The full display you mentioned is a required scene for almost every horror flick in existence.
I’ve been reading news releases about scientists creating life since the 60s, and it ain’t been so yet.
And even if they do do it, it was still created, not spontaneous.
I don’t know what that means in the larger scheme of things, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep it in mind.
Fabricated. Creation would have been sitting down and coming up with a design all their own, not mimicking one that already works.
>They used 4 different strands of pre-existing DNA to do this. They did not create the “life” from scratch. What a huge misrepresentation.
Yes and no. They certainly didn’t make up a custom soup from scratch and have it come to life. However they did make a life form with a custom set of DNA. That has huge implications in terms of being able to customize life forms. If it does enable the creation of organisms which cook up petrochemicals just using water and CO2, then the whole issue of fuel independence is solved.
“Created”?? Yeah, right.
When a scientist does that sort of “creating” with another scientist’s writings, it’s called “plagiarism”.
Until some escape into the ocean. Then the race becomes finding a way to kill them off!
I’m sure they bought the chemicals from someone else...
Wow. So the gist of this article is just a plain old lie.
Kind of like gm claiming they paid off all of their loans.
LLS
Intelligent design. But remember: it’s not science.
You can argue about the sensationalist words used by the "journalists", but that doesn't change that fact that this is an incredible accomplishment that's never been done before.
Perhaps a better words would be genetic engineering. One species of bacteria was turned into another species of bacteria in the process. This shows that it possible to create DNA from scratch using custom code.
It could be, but more likely it could be extremely useful.
It's either, depending on the intentions and/or motives of the person who does it.
>Until some escape into the ocean. Then the race becomes finding a way to kill them off!
Yes, one would have to be careful. However assuming the people are smart (which seems likely), you design the critters to breed only under controlled conditions so you don’t have contamination issues.
I didn't see this bit. Yes, that makes their "synthesis" a lot less than pure.
If you read the article linked in post #17 you'll see that the 1000 unit strands that were "stitched" together were created from scratch. There were about a thousand of these strands since the total base pairs put together were about a million.
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