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Scientists have developed the technology to create synthetic bacteria and other very basic biological organisms. Now the question as to whether this consititutes the creation of synthetic life is a highly emotive question, and probably one that us lot here wouldn't be able to answer comprehensively.

What is interesting is that there has already been a lot of fretting about whether this is another one of those "steps too far", of course as a scientist I think its a fantastic breakthrough and potentially could provide us with a whole raft of technical solutions to the very, very serious problems that we face. Though of course it does pose some enormous ethical and philosophical questions for all humans. So what do people think of this, that it will soon be possible to create lifeforms sythnetically, does it make you excited or afraid, or perhaps a little of both?

Galbally;711931 wrote: Scientists have developed the technology to create synthetic bacteria and other very basic biological organisms. Now the question as to whether this consititutes the creation of synthetic life is a highly emotive question, and probably one that us lot here wouldn't be able to answer comprehensively.

What is interesting is that there has already been a lot of fretting about whether this is another one of those "steps too far", of course as a scientist I think its a fantastic breakthrough and potentially could provide us with a whole raft of technical solutions to the very, very serious problems that we face. Though of course it does pose some enormous ethical and philosophical questions for all humans. So what do people think of this, that it will soon be possible to create lifeforms sythnetically, does it make you excited or afraid, or perhaps a little of both?


Is this an extension of the Miller Experiment, a synthesis from extracts of existing bacteria or a full blown "lets start with a handful of inorganics and build us a lifeform - if so is the result a virus or a bacterium.

Number one, bravo - vindication after ?seventy? years of trying

Number two, so what - another step on from GM

Number three(a), I'm impressed - by the understanding and design work mainly but also by the level of chemistry required to implement the final design

Number three(b), Jesus Christ Almighty - save us from ourselves for we are not ready.



Which is it and where do you stand?

Very interesting Galbally, and nice to see you again.

I've often thought it is the nature of mankind to be driven to continually push the barriers. Perhaps this is part of our survival equipment. It also seems to go with the territory that we will continually agonise about this drive, and where it takes us. Maybe it is unstoppable, and maybe each new step contains, like we all do, both good and evil possibilities. Then we will agonise again about the nature of good and evil, and indeed, the meaning of meaning. And so it goes. Scary, exciting, wonderful, terrifying.

It's so much a scratching of the surface that it's not what I'd call synthetic at all. It's copy/pasting existing functional genes. They can be sourced from different species and bring about new combinations which is scary in its own right, but it's not synthesis - not even if the functional genes are recreated base by base instead of taken across wholesale.

Synthetic would be designing a new fresh unseen functional protein from scratch.

Synthetic would be designing new unseen base-pairs into the existing DNA backbone and making new transcriptors that hooked effectively to them.

Synthetic would be finding an entirely new substrate which supported competitive exploitation of an environment.

None of those would endanger existing species in terms of genetic pollution, though I can imagine that a competitor species could be formed which displaced some existing species by out-competing it. Fast-growth salmon are doing that already.

this is like "man-made" substances then... it's really just "man-altered"?

Galbally;711931 wrote: Scientists have developed the technology to create synthetic bacteria and other very basic biological organisms. Now the question as to whether this consititutes the creation of synthetic life is a highly emotive question, and probably one that us lot here wouldn't be able to answer comprehensively.




Well, my answer is pretty comprehensive. No discussion! Synthetic life is bad, real bad. Our species hasn't the wherewithall to support synthetic life so until we do we shouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Honestly! What will crackpots think of next .



J/K actually I don't know how I feel about this topic. I just know I wouldn't like to engage with something synthetic that could enter my body (I don't even like condoms ).

E

Galbally;711931 wrote: Scientists have developed the technology to create synthetic bacteria and other very basic biological organisms. Now the question as to whether this consititutes the creation of synthetic life is a highly emotive question, and probably one that us lot here wouldn't be able to answer comprehensively.



What is interesting is that there has already been a lot of fretting about whether this is another one of those "steps too far", of course as a scientist I think its a fantastic breakthrough and potentially could provide us with a whole raft of technical solutions to the very, very serious problems that we face. Though of course it does pose some enormous ethical and philosophical questions for all humans. So what do people think of this, that it will soon be possible to create lifeforms sythnetically, does it make you excited or afraid, or perhaps a little of both?




When science can cure the common cold I will take these findings much more seriously...



I say....

Create a bacteria (culture) that cures the common cold...Until then.......stop playing with mother nature..

When you can do that (cure the common cold), then you get my attention Mr scientist, then we can talk about synthetic bacteria and the creation of synthetic life.

But sheesh we can not even cure the common cold...

What's up with that?

Galbally;711931 wrote: Scientists have developed the technology to create synthetic bacteria and other very basic biological organisms. Now the question as to whether this consititutes the creation of synthetic life is a highly emotive question, and probably one that us lot here wouldn't be able to answer comprehensively.

What is interesting is that there has already been a lot of fretting about whether this is another one of those "steps too far", of course as a scientist I think its a fantastic breakthrough and potentially could provide us with a whole raft of technical solutions to the very, very serious problems that we face. Though of course it does pose some enormous ethical and philosophical questions for all humans. So what do people think of this, that it will soon be possible to create lifeforms sythnetically, does it make you excited or afraid, or perhaps a little of both?


EXCITED! How fascinating!

I am delighted to hear about this breakthrough as I am approaching my 53rd year and will be needing an body upgrade in about thirty years! Sorry, I just couldn't help it.:rolleyes:

Seriously, we need to start a web sight that protests the dumbing down of the science departments in grade schools. Intelligent design?!!! Come on people, when are people going to get past the fact that they are just an organism on a tiny little planet, in a dieing solar system. God is just an excuse to have faith in coincidence disguised as miracles, and hope, hope that life is more than what it is.

spot;712012 wrote: It's so much a scratching of the surface that it's not what I'd call synthetic at all. It's copy/pasting existing functional genes. They can be sourced from different species and bring about new combinations which is scary in its own right, but it's not synthesis - not even if the functional genes are recreated base by base instead of taken across wholesale.

Synthetic would be designing a new fresh unseen functional protein from scratch.

Synthetic would be designing new unseen base-pairs into the existing DNA backbone and making new transcriptors that hooked effectively to them.

Synthetic would be finding an entirely new substrate which supported competitive exploitation of an environment.

None of those would endanger existing species in terms of genetic pollution, though I can imagine that a competitor species could be formed which displaced some existing species by out-competing it. Fast-growth salmon are doing that already.


Option two then. Do you have a link, I'd be interested in reading it.

Bryn Mawr;712045 wrote: Option two then. Do you have a link, I'd be interested in reading it.


You can read about it top-down or bottom up.

David Brin's blog mentions this year's Venter patent, he's worth looking at for all sorts of reasons:Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have for a U.S. patent on a minimal bacterial genome that they built themselves. According to the patent application, it's "a minimal set of protein-coding genes which provides the information required for replication of a free-living organism in a rich bacterial culture medium."

Interesting, thanks for all your thoughts. Its not my field but I think its fascinating, I think it can be seen as one of those breakthrough moments in science. And certainly the potential applications are enormous as far as I can see, though with of course there is room for abuse of the technology also. But I think on the whole a very positive thing and also a sure contender for a noble prize at some time in the near future, that is once the actual work has been completed.

spot;712054 wrote: You can read about it top-down or bottom up.

David Brin's blog mentions this year's Venter patent, he's worth looking at for all sorts of reasons:Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have for a U.S. patent on a minimal bacterial genome that they built themselves. According to the patent application, it's "a minimal set of protein-coding genes which provides the information required for replication of a free-living organism in a rich bacterial culture medium."


As you say, David Brin is always worth reading.

So basically they've put together a test harness they can use to carry any genetic characteristics they can pull out of other organisms. Useful as the result is "clean" - not carrying any unwanted side traits.

It's still only an extension of existing GM techniques - cut the required characteristic out and stitch it into another gene set. The new bit is that the other gene set is itself a chopped out string. Definitely clever but not the creation of synthetic life.

Moral? Ethical? I don't see why not.

Dangerous - certainly in the wrong hands but that goes for many, many things and the possible benefits are enormous.

His product has the disadvantage - for the organism - of requiring Venter Soup to survive. For Venter it's quite a benefit. Whatever it is it's not going to spread anywhere, he's tamed it and put it on a short leash.

spot;712269 wrote: His product has the disadvantage - for the organism - of requiring Venter Soup to survive. For Venter it's quite a benefit. Whatever it is it's not going to spread anywhere, he's tamed it and put it on a short leash.


A good control mechanism - to be applauded.

I don't like it, next we get synthetic Cancer and we can't even cure the real cancer yet.

Not subscribing

Thanks

minks;712274 wrote: I don't like it, next we get synthetic Cancer and we can't even cure the real cancer yet.

Not subscribing

Thanks


Why does the one lead to the other? I don't see the link

Given the number and ease of manufacture of chemical carcinogens, why would anybody bother?

I suppose another interesting aspect of what this work shows is the basic genome that is required for a living organism 130 odd genes or whatever that number is, but as was pointed out this is more a cutting and pasting exercise on a genome. What you do have once the basic organism is there is a platform to which you could add genetically derived abilities such as for instances for having bacteria that could biologically capture CO2 molecules, or perhaps photosynthesize sun light into chemical energy and then chemically convert that energy into a useful form, a sort of bio-photovoltaic cell (very useful if its possible), or a whole range of biotechnologies for either environmental remediation, the creation of bio-energy bacterial energy sources, the creation of bioplastics from self-polmerizing bacteria (very useful in medical applications), or the usual bio-drugs and the whole gamut of possible applications.

I agree that this is not strictly a synthetic lifeform, though thats arguable, I think for it to be truly synthetic the bacteria would have to be constructed molecule by molecule and also the genome would have to be constructed using the 4 amino acids, sequence by sequence via some complex biochemistry. That kind of ability is a long way off, though by no means impossible given enough time and effort, I am sure it will happen eventually.

Galbally;712385 wrote: That kind of ability is a long way off, though by no means impossible given enough time and effort, I am sure it will happen eventually.


I'm sure it will. I did a term at Birkbeck College back in the 80s on genetic engineering and what struck me most at the time was the way it paralleled patching machine code (something else I used to do back then). If you have no source and no documentation it's shockingly difficult to understand the functionality of the very limited information the code provides. What's needed is an ability to translate that machine code back to an editable documented source text. Going back to an assembly level isn't enough, it needs to invoke macro level constructs and a high-level recognition of the common subroutine elements which are expanded without any explicit marking in the gene itself. Anyone who can get a gene translated into that form of listing would have a tool capable of designing new functionality. Nobody is even trying yet as far as I can tell.

spot;712388 wrote: I'm sure it will. I did a term at Birkbeck College back in the 80s on genetic engineering and what struck me most at the time was the way it paralleled patching machine code (something else I used to do back then). If you have no source and no documentation it's shockingly difficult to understand the functionality of the very limited information the code provides. What's needed is an ability to translate that machine code back to an editable documented source text. Going back to an assembly level isn't enough, it needs to invoke macro level constructs and a high-level recognition of the common subroutine elements which are expanded without any explicit marking in the gene itself. Anyone who can get a gene translated into that form of listing would have a tool capable of designing new functionality. Nobody is even trying yet as far as I can tell.


A genetic dis-assembler - what a fascinating concept. I'd suspect that there are so many ways to skin a cat that it would be difficult to find enough commonality.

If it all fell out into sub-routines to do this and macros to do that then it would be frighteningly close to intelligent design rather than random growth.

Maybe that's why no-one's looking.

I am not that great about computer programming or computer science, but I think that trying to create a "key" to the human genome is actually one of the ultimate goals of genome research, biologists have mapped the genome, but like you said, most of the information at present is meaningless as its undetermined what each piece of DNA relates to (if anything), though little by little areas are being opened up and eventually there may be a partial or complete key to how the human genome specifically operates.

Now again I am not a geneticist, but I believe that many genetic traits are cross-speicies, and some are speicies specific, so of course that means there are several life-times of work involved in this (or semi-intelligent computers that could just process a lot of this raw data would be useful), but eventually you may have something like that which you describe. Actually a lot of controversy in the scientific world I think relates to this very issue, in terms of such information being in the public domain or not, I am sure it would have to be eventually. The main issue is that we are talking about an awful lot of raw code that has cross-effects on other sections of code, so its all horribly complex, but certainly we seem to understand a hell of a lot more about it than we used to.

Galbally;712825 wrote: I am not that great about computer programming or computer science, but I think that trying to create a "key" to the human genome is actually one of the ultimate goals of genome research, biologists have mapped the genome, but like you said, most of the information at present is meaningless as its undetermined what each piece of DNA relates to (if anything), though little by little areas are being opened up and eventually there may be a partial or complete key to how the human genome specifically operates.

Now again I am not a geneticist, but I believe that many genetic traits are cross-speicies, and some are speicies specific, so of course that means there are several life-times of work involved in this (or semi-intelligent computers that could just process a lot of this raw data would be useful), but eventually you may have something like that which you describe. Actually a lot of controversy in the scientific world I think relates to this very issue, in terms of such information being in the public domain or not, I am sure it would have to be eventually. The main issue is that we are talking about an awful lot of raw code that has cross-effects on other sections of code, so its all horribly complex, but certainly we seem to understand a hell of a lot more about it than we used to.


There certainly is a lot of cross species traits where the same genetic code is used to perform the same function. That's not a problem - the species in question share a common ancestor who had that chromosome sequence and it's propagated through. Indeed, the degree of commonality is used to estimate the time since the species diverged.

What would be a problem is if the same chromosome sequence was used every time an organism wanted to move a protein across a cell boundary and the same series of chromosome sequences was used every time an organism wanted to replicate a DNA string.

This would contradict the concept of evolution by mutation and the idea of the primordial soup building multiple scenarios before a combination formed a (several?) viable life form(s) to begin that evolution.

Bryn Mawr;712951 wrote: There certainly is a lot of cross species traits where the same genetic code is used to perform the same function. That's not a problem - the species in question share a common ancestor who had that chromosome sequence and it's propagated through. Indeed, the degree of commonality is used to estimate the time since the species diverged.It goes way back further than that.

Here's a really neat paper which looks at the haemoglobin gene. It could be argued that this has come into existence many times because it's such a powerful thing to have available to live with, so the paper sidesteps that question. The gene is split along the chromosome by non-gene elements, introns. When the gene is expressed the coding sections, exons, are pulled together and the introns are dropped. The paper considers the distribution of the exons and traces their shifts through the last 1500 million years. What staggers me is that there was a fully working haemoglobin that long ago - ALL the evolutionary effort to build that gene was complete at that stage, and we're still talking single-celled lifeforms back then. You're walking round with about 15 grams of what it makes per 100 mls of blood, and the instructions for that were fixed before life went multicellular. That just astounds me. We're talking about an identifiable cross-comparison that shows up in all of today's bacteria, plants and animals, having started as a functional component of the common ancestor to all three groups. People seem to assume that the first synthetic life will be a sludgy cell like that. My opinion is that most of the evolutionary toolkit has been constructed by that point and reaching that level is like entering the stadium at the end of a marathon.

Figure 3 of Hemoglobins from bacteria to man: evolution of different patterns of gene expression, Ross Hardison is the place to look, once you've read the abstract.

Thanks spot I saved that paper on my desk top in work, it is astounding when the facts of evolutionary development of all life is laid out in front of you. I know I have felt my head spin from time to time, but I guess thats part of the thrill and the fun of science sometimes.