(no subject)

[avevale_intelligencer]

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.

Comments

[tarkrai.livejournal.com]

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.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

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...

[armb.livejournal.com]

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...."