avevale_intelligencer | (no subject)

Sorry about yesterday.

Several people have raved in my hearing about the "Scientists create life" story that's come up, in which a Doctor Craig Venter and his team have designed a synthetic genome and implanted it into a host cell. I have read the Guardian article, but as you all know I'm a fuzzy-minded arts person, so could someone clarify for me: was the host cell already living when the genome was implanted into it? That's certainly the impression I'm getting. Which, if true, means that, while the scientists have in fact created an artificial living thing, they've actually done it by modifying an existing living thing. This is not, if I'm right, your actual "life out of lifeless tissue" or "life out of primordial soup" or "life out of nothing" jobbie. The life was there already. They just modded the software.

I'm going very gently here, because I don't want to push anyone's buttons the way mine got pushed. Am I right about this or am I wrong?

EDIT: looks as if I'm wrong--they're calling the host a "dead" cell in another article. So, life out of lifeless tissue. Two more steps to go, and then I'll have to start falling back to "well, all right, life may be entirely physical, but what about intelligence, eh? eh?" And then they'll do that as well, and then I'll know that everything is exactly as it seems, and that will be that.

Or maybe they'll find there's something they can't do at this stage of our development, and I shall rejoice, because it isn't meant to be that simple.

Housework. I shall arise and go now and do housework. We have company coming in a week's time.

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I only know about it from the articles (Grauniad, BBC and The Register), but as far as I can see you are close to correct. The new thing is that they didn't just mod the software, they allegedly wrote it from scratch[1].

But they then did insert it (as I understand it) into an already 'living' cell which had its program removed. And it then reproduced (which that cell couldn't do without the program) and did whatever they intended it to do (none of the articles went into details on that).

Quite how much of the rest of the cell is non-trivial, and whether they have managed to make that separately, I don't understand. But to me, too, the fuss about "scientists have created life" seems over-stated. Yes, a breakthrough, and as a (computer) programmer I find it very exciting what they have done, but I wish the media didn't blow it out of proportion.

[1] Yes, they learned how to program it by reverse engineering the original versions. If that's the complaint (and I'm not saying that it is in yor case, it's one I have seen others make, and one I've seen directed against computer programmers) then no one "writes a novel" either, all they do is assemble existing words according to established syntax.

In re. the Nycon, I have people coming to work on the house Saturday morning. I have, however, been promised that they'll be coming early and it will be a quick job (and so far their 'early' has meant just after 8am so I'm not actually dressed yet). So I'm expecting to arrive somwhere mid to late Saturday morning, hopefully after people are up (yes, I remember Nycon 'morning' times!).

See you then. And v-hugs to both of you and real ones next weekend...

As far as I understand it (and remember that this is from articles written by journalists who may well have got lots of details wrong) it was something similar to:

Work out the sequence of the DNA.
Make, from elementary chemicals, an exact copy of that DNA.
Take the original DNA out of a living cell and replace it with the identical copy made from elementary chemicals.

So no, it's not a world-shattering event. But it is a critical single step in the path.

For the first time ever, a living organism is running on DNA that isn't *of itself* directly descended from the first replicating 'organism' billions of years ago.

It's, of itself, nothing new. As I understand it, you wouldn't be able to see any difference between that cell and all the others. But what they can do now is start making changes to the DNA they generate and see what results. So they have an extremely powerful new tool for doing research.

And if they ever do make an entirely artificial life form this is one of the tools they will be using, and which they wouldn't be able to manage without.

All the structures inside of a cell (nucleus and so forth) already existed.

They removed the DNA from the nucleus of a living cell, and replaced it with DNA that was (using chemical processes) artificially created.

The artificial DNA was created by first reverse-engineering the original genome of this species of bacteria; and then modifying it.

They've been trying to do this for something like 15 years. Ergo, (even though the media hasn't reported it); every other bacterium that they've done this DNA replacement procedure on has died.

So, all that has happened is that they've done in effect, a heart transplant with a completely artificial heart on a molecular level. The bacterium could not be 'dead' for long; otherwise the delicate internal structures that allow it to live would not have been able to return to processing food and reproducing.

The bad news- we now have the tools that could really kill us all in a way that is totally unstoppable.

The good news- the conception of algae that eats carbon dioxide and spits out oil products, or eats oil products and spits out carbon dioxide, etc, is in the realm of possibility.

Pandora has opened yet another box.

Well, I've been waiting for that particular bit of good news for some time. We got ourselves into this mess with technology, so it has always stood to reason for me that technology of some kind was the only way we'd ever stand a chance of doing more than slow down our extinction. So that's good.

And we've had tools that could kill us all for a while. There's a greater risk now that it could happen accidentally, maybe, but we wouldn't let that happen, would we?

Would we?

Guys?

Ah hmm well, back to the housework...

It's also a step towards there being a greater risk of it being done deliberately. For example, it means that if we completely sequence the genes of smallpox, then destroying all the (very few) remaining samples of smallpox in the world doesn't ensure that smallpox never exists again - someone might be able to recreate it.

(Smallpox is actually a bad example, because it's a virus, and viruses arguably aren't alive without a host cell, and synthesising them is an earlier step - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2122619.stm )

But smallpox didn't kill us all before, and we know how to vaccinate against it, so that will be nasty, but not the end of the human race or anything.

But it might also lead to someone saying "aha, I can see how to tweak this into something much much nastier". Which in turn might lead to deciding to try it in a lab with insufficient precautions against it getting out, or deciding to be the instrument of wreaking God's wrath upon Earth.

Or "my new oil-producing plant will solve our energy problems - the sting isn't really a problem even though they move about, you would have to be blind not to be able to avoid them...."

Read this

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/05/its_alive_1.php

and

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/05/20/synthetic-genome-natural-cell-new-life/

and

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/328/5981/958?sa_campaign=Email/toc/21-May-2010/10.1126/science.328.5981.958

and, above all, the full text (PDA) of the paper here

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719

Then give your informed opinion.

I don't, of course, understand the full text of the paper, and one of the articles (which I had already read, see edit) says he did write the genome from scratch and another one says he didn't, so I think I'll stick with the semi-informed opinions already given and form my own uninformed opinion from them.

It's certainly a step forward in understanding, and that's a good thing by anyone's standards. I do not think it means what you think it means (see title), but meaning is entirely a matter of opinion...

(Which is about all I can get my head around).

They've studied springs to the point that they can build their own; and put it in a clock that didn't have a spring to make it run.

As has been stated above, it's a good first step, but as usual it's been grossly misinterpreted by most of the media.

The article I heard on NPR said that the scientists involved were upset with the newspeople who insisted on sensationalist headlines like "Scientists Create Life".

Oh, I think it's fair to say that scientists did create life.

They just didn't create it from scratch.

Whether it's fair to say that or not (and I think other ways of saying what they did are, at the least, far more accurate), I think it's worth noting that they didn't make such grandiose claims and they weren't pleased that said claims were made about them.

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Nycon

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Conceivable!

Clockwork analogy

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