This will make fundies heads explode..."Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms"

[SaveElmer]

It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.

Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

"This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be," said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies science's effects on society. "Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes."

That unprecedented degree of control over creation raises more than philosophical questions, however. What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make? How will these self-replicating entities be contained? And who might end up owning the patent rights to the basic tools for synthesizing life?

Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core "operating system" for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands.

"We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?" asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/16/AR2007121601900_pf.html

[aquart]

1. Fundies? It makes me pretty nervous.

[unpossibles]

7. well, if science fiction has taught us anything

it's that nothing ever goes wrong with projects like these.

:)

Personally, I find it pretty fascinating on a few levels. Sure it has potential for problems too, but it's really neat too.

[SaveElmer]

16. Two different things...

Makes me nervous too...though not so nervous I think it should stop...

But that's different than viewing it as a theological threat

[Teaser]

2. not sure this will work

if the process is as simple as described. Seems more like creating a virus and injecting it into a host. It's unlikely the genomes encode proteins that will be anything particularly healthy for the host cell.

[mike_c]

9. duplicating natural chromosomes would indeed produce useful proteins....

Remember, the cells themselves are biochemical machines with their own run-time requirements-- any artificial CHROMOSOME would have to encode all the necessary metabolic enzymes, structural proteins, etc just to keep the host cell alive so that novel proteins might be expressed. Viruses don't insert anything nearly so complicated-- conversely, any DNA molecule that encodes those pathways must be much more complex than a virus or a simple transformation.

on edit: I'm presuming we're talking about inserting an artificial prokaryotic chromosome into a bacterium-- anything eukaryotic would be much too complex, have multiple chromosomes, much more difficult regulatory mechanisms, etc. We're a LONG way from there!

[Teaser]

20. Are we talking about that?

I was under the impression they were just assembling random artificial codons and then inserting them.

[mike_c]

24. that would certainly NOT work....

That wouldn't be any better than loading five megabytes of random hexadecimal numbers into RAM and expecting it to be an operating system. I assumed this was something along the lines of artificial bacterial F-plasmids currently used as insertion vectors, but with the goal of replicating a functioning chromosome first, then moving on to designer genes. I'd think the biggest hurdle would be figuring out all the regulatory sequences, many of which are only active under specialized metabolic conditions-- but that's another thread, I think!

Both bacterial and yeast artificial chromosomes are currently used as models for testing regulatory schema in prokaryotes and eukaryotes, although it's not my field. It's my understanding that they are essentially deconstructed natural chromosomes, although when stuck into nuclei that already have working copies of those chromosomes the fine points of gene regulation tend to be blurred, so they're used to model disease in concert with genetic knockouts and as transformation insertion vectors.

Again, though, it's not really my field-- if you do molecular genetics you're certainly better informed about this than I am.

[CT_Progressive]

3. Cool, proof that God doesn't exist! I like it!

:D

[Teaser]

4. you have an unusually unmathematical notion of proof

.

[CT_Progressive]

13. Its purely mathematical.

- God can never be wrong, or he would cease to exist.
- God claims only He can create life.
- Man creates life, proving God wrong.
Therefore: God ceases to exist.

Basic math, actually. (Well, Logic, not Math, but its pretty much the same thing)

[baldguy]

12. This doesn't prove God doesn't exist.

Just that He's a little more sophisticated than the nomadic goat herders from 4th century BCE Judea would have you believe.

[Warpy]

15. No, the fact that Sun Myung Moon is alive

is adequate proof that the god of the OT who didn't want other gods put before him is asleep, AWOL, or a collective figment of the Hebrew imagination.

[mike_c]

17. ROFLMAO!

:rofl:

[JVS]

5. I'm going to try to beat Pope Benedict to the punch and declare: THIS IS SOME EVIL SHIT!

[mike_c]

6. this only raises serious questions about the nature of life for the superstitious....

"Life" is the operation of self duplicating biochemical machines. As a biologist, I'm completely comfortable with that. There is no need to invoke supernatural causes to explain "life", or to participate in the paleolithic philosophical quandaries of the superstitious.

[Kokonoe]

8. actually fundies want new life forms, synthetic DNA

It's OK as long as it uses chemical weapon phosphorous to wipe out Katrina survivors

[librechik]

10. can we turn it into a weapon? (If we can, you know we will) Watch out for SuperPrions!

I hereby copyright that term.

[laconicsax]

11. Oh great, now we're making Cylons?

[Buzz Clik]

14. Sounds like someone is about to get smited. (smote?)

[Kokonoe]

18. I love Elmer support reply

the buck stops here

[tom_paine]

19. This is a very bad idea. Not because the idea itself is intrisically bad, but

because we simply do not know enough about the long-term consequences nor what these hypothetical life-forms will do when they are released or escape in the wild.

We have already experienced many unintended consequences from our previous inventions, mass-produced without consideration. Unintended consequences such as microbial drug resistance and ozone depletion.

Once again, we are about to tamper about which we know very little. It is the primate way.

[hootinholler]

21. Yep!

One of these days we are collectively gonna shout "Hey Y'all watch this!"

Wasn't there a debate about whether or not the first H bomb would run away and consume the entire atmosphere?

One more step on the road to grey goo.

-Hoot

[Gold Metal Flake]

22. How about preserving the life that's ALREADY HERE?

[MilesColtrane]

23. This doesn't make me nervous.

Nanotechnology (self replicating assemblers) make me nervous.

[qwertyMike]

25. We need new life forms?

Jeez the one we have isn't working too well.

Fix that one first (not a chance)