Posted on 07/11/2002 6:13:12 PM PDT by Nebullis
Scientists have assembled the first synthetic virus.
The US researchers built the infectious agent from scratch using the genome sequence for polio.
How about -- getting even more science-fictionish -- anti-virus viruses? Trouble with antibodies is you have to inject them into the recipient, they won't just go and do their work if sprayed into the air. Creating an anti-germ to fight the germ would get around that problem.
Thanks. I think you get my drift. It's the same order of magnitude. There are people (e.g. Clyde Hutchinson) working on the Mycoplasma already and have wittled the number of essential genes from 500 down to 200.
The argument used to be that you can't create life from non-life...
Probably because it's not someone saying that some god is doing it her/himself and that we should just leave it up to him/her.
The idea that life has been created from non-life boggles my mind, if no one else's. I'm not certain what to make of it other than it must at least suggest we ought to step back and consider the effect on basic beliefs.
Do not worry, it is in good hands. Such research is funded by the Pentagon not by the terrorists. It means that the defence and security budget needs to be increased to be ahead of potential enemies. And Iraq should be attacked soo before it is too late!
From the Reuters article on the same subject:
Eckard Wimmer, who led the study, denies that he has created life.
"No, I would not say I created life in a test tube," Wimmer said in a telephone interview. "We created a chemical in a test tube that, when put into cells, begins to behave a little bit like something alive. Some people say viruses are chemicals and I belong to that group."
Wimmer said once the right genetic parts were in place, the virus virtually self-assembled in a lab dish.
Polio virus does not have DNA like many organisms, but starts out with RNA, which is the working version of DNA. DNA carries the genetic code in cells, and is transcribed into RNA, which controls the production of individual proteins.
To make a virus, Wimmer and colleagues Jeronimo Cello and Aniko Paul had to first take a step backward.
"You cannot synthesize RNA," Wimmer said. "So we converted the sequence from RNA into DNA. And DNA you can synthesize. Then we had to go back to RNA. That was very simple -- by using an enzyme which can read DNA and synthesize RNA, called a transcriptase," he added.
Now you have the RNA. That RNA we put into a cell-free juice that we developed in 1991 ... and lo and behold out came the virus. It built itself."
"cell-free juice" is made by taking the virus's favorite home -- a human cell -- shredding it up and removing the big pieces such as the nucleus.
Actually no. I just worry about the morals of the men/women who have the ability to do this. Not from a religious standpoint, more from the worry of them selling out to the highest bidder.
The religious issues are another subject altogether.
Ruck
That's not supposed to happen according to some people.
But we can't control what the bad guys do. They won't refrain from doing developing these techniques simply because we fancy ourselves "too ethical" to perform such research. No matter what we do, evil people will acquire this ability someday.
The only possible way to prevail is for us to stay one or more steps ahead of them. That means pushing as far as possible, as fast as possible, on all fronts. Once we fall behind, we are lost.
...because it was done here first, when it might have happened in Baghdad, Tehran, Beijing or Pyongyang.
This is the quote that struck me. It sounds like they didn't expect it to happen, either.
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