Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10
Years
Synthetic life made from the basic
chemicals in DNA
SETH BORENSTEIN / AP / San Jose
Mercury News 19aug2007
Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from
scratch and they're getting closer.
|
"We're
talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty
fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to
predict."
—
CEO of ProtoLife.
Mindfully.org
note:
It's not bad enough they've already done
some amazingly disastrous things with existing technologies such as:
-
Proliferating
plastics until it outweighs zooplankton in the oceans;
-
Polluting
all waters with pesticides;
-
Contaminating
every life form on Earth until each has difficulty in reproducing; and
-
oh, so much
more that will never be undone or corrected.
Technology has
consistently delivered shockingly unexpected results. Each new technology
is meant to solve the errors and effects of the previous one and seemingly
requires a further technological fix.
The logic used in the reasoning of these characters is significantly
flawed. For instance, how can "creating protocells ha[ve] the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe"?
The correct response to this may be that our place is to disappear
from the universe. We see these technologies as the tools to our
end. |
Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the
now little-known field of "wet artificial life."
"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about
it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice,
Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that
could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are
impossible to predict."
That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA
— may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look
in a microscope to see it.
"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in
the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few
fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."
And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the
potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking
up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.
Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:
- A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow
good ones, and the ability to multiply.
- A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to
reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.
- A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and
then changes it into energy.
One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School,
predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that
the first step — creating a cell membrane — is "not a big
problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.
Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the
building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.
His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in
the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.
"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the
hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation
for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of
natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine,
guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic
code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.
Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could
"run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very
long time before that is a problem.
"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a
huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he
said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could
this happen."
source:
19aug2007