avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2010-05-22 09:17 am
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2010-05-22 09:17 am
(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.
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.
no subject
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.