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As soon as I saw the headlines on this story I knew there was an overdose of hype involved.
1 posted on 05/21/2010 6:58:36 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
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To: PJ-Comix

“Venter, who was careful to add that he had not created new life from scratch.”

Decent of him - maybe we can get him into the White House, since its current occupant is entirely likely to say the opposite.

Colonel, USAFR


2 posted on 05/21/2010 7:03:06 AM PDT by jagusafr (Don't make deals with pirates)
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To: PJ-Comix

They put new DNA into existing cells, and they replicated.

It’s impressive on its own. But it’s not “new life.”


3 posted on 05/21/2010 7:03:18 AM PDT by Travis McGee (---www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com---)
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To: PJ-Comix
Ventner got a lot of media attention after his company sequenced the human genome, along with the NIH efforts. Sequencing is done by machines, and is not hard science. He made claims he shouldn't have after he became a media celebrity. Now it seems he wants to be back in the spotlight again.

Incidentally, no, they did not ‘create’ life.

4 posted on 05/21/2010 7:03:54 AM PDT by pieceofthepuzzle
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To: PJ-Comix

The materialists atheists just want to take God out of the equation!


5 posted on 05/21/2010 7:04:17 AM PDT by Mr. Right Now
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To: PJ-Comix

The materialists atheists just want to take God out of the equation!


6 posted on 05/21/2010 7:05:14 AM PDT by Mr. Right Now
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To: PJ-Comix
Reminds me of the joke about a scientist who told God he knows how to create life. God asked him to demonstrate:

Scientist - "First you take a handful dirt"
God - "No, you get your own dirt"

7 posted on 05/21/2010 7:05:15 AM PDT by AU72
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To: PJ-Comix

Glad to see this scientist has the good sense not to go along with the lamestream media’s hype.

I guess journalism school is full of underachivers these days. Since if any of them had actually read the contents of their OWN articles it clearly explained no ‘new’ life had been created.


8 posted on 05/21/2010 7:09:33 AM PDT by battousai (The mainstream media; as honest as the French are clean.)
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To: PJ-Comix
Not creating life, just programming.
And since I know a few things about programming - God Help Us!

10 posted on 05/21/2010 7:15:17 AM PDT by BitWielder1 (Corporate Profits are better than Government Waste)
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To: PJ-Comix

Reporters can screw up the report of a one car funeral!


11 posted on 05/21/2010 7:15:52 AM PDT by Don Corleone ("Oil the gun..eat the cannolis. Take it to the Mattress.")
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To: PJ-Comix

What the press, most people, and even most scientists don’t realize is that the bulk of inheritable material received by a newly conceived multi-cell organism (or a single-cell animal created by binary fission) is not the genetic material itself, but the “other stuff” in the cell. The genetic material itself is little more than CNC-like instructions for making various proteins. The “other stuff” is the actual factory for processing the instructions, and this other stuff is far more complex and contains far more information than the genetic material itself.

Furthermore, these two parts would have had to have been designed together from the very start, and neither one could have been made independently of the other, no more than it would be possible to independently invent the machine code used by an Itanium processor and the processor chip itself (and expect them to work together usefully), though these two designs contain infinitesimally less information than a living cell and its genetic material.

Designing and synthesizing some genetic material that can be made to function in an existing cell is quite an achievement, but is still equivalent to a cave man making a functioning machine-language boot loader, with no idea in the world how the CPU chip works or what an operating system is.

Certainly what was done does not count as creating life, not even close. Now if mankind could start with a shelf full of chemicals, and from that synthesize a completely self-replicating, self-sustaining cellular organism, then you’d be walking the walk, rather than just talking the talk!


15 posted on 05/21/2010 8:33:06 AM PDT by catnipman (q)
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To: PJ-Comix

ping


16 posted on 05/21/2010 10:30:29 AM PDT by celmak
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