Art Of Living
Saturday, 8. March 2008, 09:06:21
Scientists have synthesised DNA but is that getting a life?
The journal Science reported recently that a team of American scientists had succeeded in building the entire DNA code of a small bacterium in the laboratory using genetic material they had chemically synthesised bit by bit. Specifically what they did was use yeast to staple together four long strands of DNA into the genome match of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium god transplanted it into another cell so that it could exploit the already existing machinery inside to boot up and start growing and reproducing. It did so. But is that creating a new life form? Not really, because DNA is only a set of instructions- massively complex, of course, but essentially just that- which requires a host to actually carry them out.
It's like computer software, without the hardware to run it on, it can only sit there doing nothing. At most, with this technology they can sit there doing nothing. A most, with this technology they can probably design a genome to incorporate a particular chemical process to change what the cells are eating and making and thus, make robotic cells. In other words, create new types of custom or biofuels like ethanol which humans can use.
At the same time, the fact that bioethics groups- in particular a Canadian one which has dubbed the new creation Synthia- have immediately protested, saying this is where mankind should never go, shows they're worried. "For the first time, God has competition",they said. They could be right. Because he the software can be made, how long for the hard stuff to be made? When that happens scientists who finally be doing what the Earth has been doing some four billion years ago when it churned out cellular life-as-we-know-it-today on this planet. Yet other kinds of lives which we never dreamed could be possible are already looming over our horizon.
Self-replicating mechanical devices such as nanobots and sapiens but bodiless artificial intelligence without physical manifestation are constructs that could in the future defy current definitions of what constitutes something as "alive". So could digitised brains uploaded into computers or silicon minds downloaded from them into organic bodies. And we're not ever talking about the rest of the universe, of what shape life may have taken there in the past, or, even as I write this, shaping up to do so right now.
The journal Science reported recently that a team of American scientists had succeeded in building the entire DNA code of a small bacterium in the laboratory using genetic material they had chemically synthesised bit by bit. Specifically what they did was use yeast to staple together four long strands of DNA into the genome match of a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium god transplanted it into another cell so that it could exploit the already existing machinery inside to boot up and start growing and reproducing. It did so. But is that creating a new life form? Not really, because DNA is only a set of instructions- massively complex, of course, but essentially just that- which requires a host to actually carry them out.
It's like computer software, without the hardware to run it on, it can only sit there doing nothing. At most, with this technology they can sit there doing nothing. A most, with this technology they can probably design a genome to incorporate a particular chemical process to change what the cells are eating and making and thus, make robotic cells. In other words, create new types of custom or biofuels like ethanol which humans can use.
At the same time, the fact that bioethics groups- in particular a Canadian one which has dubbed the new creation Synthia- have immediately protested, saying this is where mankind should never go, shows they're worried. "For the first time, God has competition",they said. They could be right. Because he the software can be made, how long for the hard stuff to be made? When that happens scientists who finally be doing what the Earth has been doing some four billion years ago when it churned out cellular life-as-we-know-it-today on this planet. Yet other kinds of lives which we never dreamed could be possible are already looming over our horizon.
Self-replicating mechanical devices such as nanobots and sapiens but bodiless artificial intelligence without physical manifestation are constructs that could in the future defy current definitions of what constitutes something as "alive". So could digitised brains uploaded into computers or silicon minds downloaded from them into organic bodies. And we're not ever talking about the rest of the universe, of what shape life may have taken there in the past, or, even as I write this, shaping up to do so right now.
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