Quest for synthetic life
As has been widely reported, the J. Craig Venter Institute and other facilities are working to assemble the world's first synthetic organism from the bottom up. The goal is to create life from non-life. Science News has a great introduction to the science of synthetic life. (This article does not delve into the debate about whether synthetic organisms should be patentable.) From Science News:
"Simplicity has always been where we try to gain understanding," says John Glass of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md. "In a way, what we're doing is making a better platform for understanding what life is." It's a bit like learning the essentials of how a luxury car works by building a dune buggy from spare parts.Link
Some scientists, including Glass, hope to make such a minimal cell by whittling down the genome of an existing bacterium to its barest elements, and then synthesizing that minimal genome. In the lab, scientists can assemble the genomic DNA by piecing together chemicals called nucleotides, which constitute the individual letters of genetic code.
Other scientists, starting from long lists of molecules and genes, are devising plans to assemble these parts to make an entire cell, not just its genome, by hand.
Still other researchers take a radically different approach. Instead of trying to construct cells from the same proteins and DNA found in modern organisms, these investigators hope to assemble a cell from more-primitive molecules that better mimic the molecules probably involved in the origin of life. If successful, these scientists may uncover clues about how the original "spontaneous generation" of life occurred billions of years ago.
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Frankly, I don't see what the fuss is about. Viruses have already been synthesized from the "ground up", both as pure nucleic acids and as disparate pieces reassembled into a functional form. Viruses are indeed organisms by any reasonable and modern definition of life, and one can make a very persuasive argument that properly designed computer programs also fit the bill.
Regardless, assembling life from little pieces happens all the time -- that's how everybody reproduces to begin with. While doing this for bacteria certainly offers some interesting technological prospects, figuring out one more way to engineer life doesn't seem to offer nearly as much insight as observing the disparate ways nature has managed the job.
As a biologist, I should probably be more excited. As an evolutionist, I think we're sometimes a bit too impressed and too narrowed by our own efforts to imitate the great experiment going on around us.
@Gerta
Most biologists do not consider viruses to be "alive" because they lack both metabolism and the ability to reproduce.
This research is incredibly significant for many reasons. First, science is based on empirical evidence, and abiogensis (a fundemental requirement of evolution) has never been observed. To recreate this event is a major milestone.
Although its a bit curious that it would be so difficult to create a simple cell when we know that they just randomly come together.
@#2
Um, again, I am a biologist. Viruses most assuredly do reproduce. They also metabolize, perhaps just not in ways consistent with thinking of organisms as walled-off entities (which of course they're not, but that's another issue). Folks looking for life's origins here and elsewhere in the universe now tend to settle on reproduction and evolution as the defining qualities of "life". Other criteria quickly devolve into special exceptions and distinctions that limit their generality. If you want a real slam-dunk essay on the issue, check out Lin Chao's 2000 article in BioScience, vol 50, p 245-250.
I'm also unclear on how creating an organism from scratch provides new empirical evidence. There's simply no question it can be done; as has already been shown with viruses, enough manipulation of the components will eventually get you there just as it does in biological reproduction. Venter's institute already achieved a complete bacterial genome transplant, and so I don't know where we're supposed to draw the arbitrary distinction for "creating" life.
Doing so under a particular set of conditions provides no firm answer regarding life's origins on earth, as we cannot observe the original conditions or (just as importantly) the specific event that gave rise to our common ancestor. How can we recreate an event when we don't even know what the event looked like? Did life start as a bleb of lipids? Unprotected RNA? Protein? They're all open questions, and I truly hope we can find airtight answers to dig further back into our ancestry. But if someone manages to create a modern bacterium from scratch, they've created something that didn't exist at life's origin. If they create a reasonable progenitor, others will (and should) doubt whether it resembles our actual common ancestor.
I understand the fascination with replicating the grand experiment. It may provide some useful technical insights. But "making life" doesn't represent the major milestone Venter (an untiring self-promoter) would like us to believe. It also won't do anything to convince a bunch of evidence-proof creationists that we came from the primordial soup. Ignoring overwhelming evidence of universal organismal ancestry has certainly immunized the lot against our origins.
anyone working on weaponized prions?
For me the most interesting thing about this is totally tangential to the evolutionary question: the Venter team is essentially trying to build the "Hello World" of microbial life, determining the very simplest possible group of chemical mechanisms that can be said to be alive. That will have powerful implications for our understanding of more complex biology all the way up to our own cells.
Are they going to create those little homunculi, like the ones in Blade Runner?
I want one of those!
:D