Why not just dig up a freshly dead corpse, carry it off to your dungeon laboratory, and run a few lightning strikes through it?
"It's Aliiiiivve! It's Aliiiiiivve!"
Reproduction is one of the tools for maintenance of life, but it is not the essential attribute of life. DNA/RNA is not the key--red herring. Cells do fine without their DNA. Until they need to repair themselves.
...or,....
The 'Big Bang' theory replaced by the 'Big From Scratch' theory?
/Intelligent Design
Yep.
It would be a nice trick, but I think he should go get his own dirt and create life from that.
As I understand it they are trying to pull off one of the oldest tricks in the book. They are attempting to create life through an "Intelligent Design" process. Do they see that approach as the most likely to succeed?
Not sure if this merits a ping to the science list, so I'll leave that to you.
Don't make me come down there! -- GOD
He's not talking about it because they are doing it for a specific reason (see the institute's name).
The other, which may prove some valuable chemistry tools, are not making life.
You mean there is another way to create life other than from scratch?
Someone attempting to do something only GOD should be able to do! The horror! Burn him!
This will most definitely be news if or when they succeed. So far it is like a cover story from Popular Science from the 1930's.
And just as credible.
Interesting.
These must be the guys who created the AIDS virus.
I saw it on BET so I know its true.
/sarcasm
Introduce them at Christmas time and sell little "Hamster Wheels" as accessories.
In the few recorded millinia in which mankind has existed, he has NEVER created anything. Man has made plenty from available resources - and many times its end results were a mess, but not one thing has he ever created.
"If all goes according to plan, these three components - container, genome, metabolism - should fit together to provide all the essentials for Darwinian evolution. As the Bugs grow and reproduce, corralled in a test tube, natural selection should favour PNA base sequences that pair up and split off fastest, and also conduct electrons most efficiently to the photosensitisers."
Not holding my breath on this one. Because they left out the one thing that no human (evev a "scientist") or evolution can produce: life itself. Only God can produce life. And I did not see His Name mentioned in the article (okay, I just skimmed it). I wonder how much of my tax money is being used (wasted) for this?
"Get your own dirt" ping for later.
http://members.tripod.com/~TechBabe/dirt.html
How many here have read Theodore Sturgeon's sf short story "Microcosmic God"? This article brings it to mind...