Artificial life???

solo

Whats your opinion?

Doom or amazing breakthrough?

olishea

breakthrough. there is always skepticism at first with medical science...and quite rightly so. But yeah it looks very promising.

TIG

Well it ain't going to have any natural predators, is it ?
So if it 'gets out' and it turns out to be 'destructive' we can't expect mother-nature to help - could turn out like GM crops x 10^10...
I know it is very clever that we can do stuff like this... but do we really need to do it ? especially when there are millions of more urgent things to sort out that the time/effort/money could have be spent on... then again, I suppose when it all goes wrong, then there'll be lots more jobs fixing it / fighting it / curing it etc..

solo

I see this as a very controversial issue, one the one hand there can be so much good that can be done with this technology and on the other hand like the Internet where the intent was noble, it's open for abuse in the wrong hands.

I foresee the radical Christians/Conservatives in the states opposing this as on moral grounds, citing banners that will read 'God creates, man doesn't', yet they will be the first to support the US military developing this into biological weapons.

I like the idea of it being used as carbon eating bacteria, bio-fuels etc, but I shudder to think of what our military might do if they get their grubby hands on it.

remus

In this case it is just a 'clone' of an existing bacteria, so chances of it going a rampage are pretty slim.

With regards to 'needing' to do it, a pretty silly point really. Whats to say they wont go on to engineer a bacteria that produces food stuff from garbage? I agree with pete that its open to abuse, though i dont think thats a good reason to stop research in this area.

TIG

Carbon-eating bacteria are great in principal, but remember that we are carbon-based life-forms - like all 'life' on earth - and when they've munched through the USA's entire coal-stocks, your car's tires or even most the Amazon rain-forest [by accident or intent] then don't come crying to me !
We are incredibly ingenious at making things - we always have been - it's just that inventing something we probably don't 'need', or we can't control if it were to 'escape' or get into the military or terrorist hands, and is so potentially destructive - seems a waste of effort to me...
We 'need' many things - cures for world hunger, climate-change, childhood obesity in the USA, Cancer, Aids, Dementia, Windows-Vista etc etc. But for a scientist to invent something 'because he can', and then reverse engineer some plausible reasons for doing so, is not a good use of our limited resources of money/time/brain-power etc.
These guys did not sit down and think, 'How can we make food out of garbage?' - they want the Nobel Prize for being the first to make artificial life ! I know it has great potential for good as well as harm - after all looong ago an axe was a pretty useful invention for cutting up stuff you needed, then some macho-militaristic cave-dweller though 'aha, I can cut up anyone I disagree with too...' - the rest is history - or rather 'genocide'... The genii is out of the bottle now so we have to roll with it and hope for the best whilst planning for the worst........

olishea

if we didn't take any risks we'd still be living in caves!

@unknownuser said:

Cancer, Aids, Dementia, Windows-Vista etc etc
haha funny guy!

I agree about the 'need' for such items. I mean, do we really need to travel to space? do we really need to time travel? do we really need skinny TVs?

No.

But it doesn't stop us from striving to achieve these things. It's what makes us human.

remus

I think the good that has come from scientific endeavour far outweighs the bad, though.

Humpmetwice

I come here every day to learn more and more about sketchup but little do I know it teaches me more and more about life each time I visit!Wonderful forum!

TIG

We don't 'need' lots of things we do have - like thousands of nuclear missiles, curable-diseases or unhealthy junk-food.
We do 'need' lots of things we do have - like education, justice or the Internet.
We don't 'need' lots of things we do have, but then they are often good to have - like the iPhone, wine or DVDs.
We don't 'need' lots of things that we could have, but they would be good to have - like Holo-TV or a Moon-base or inter-planetary travel.

I'd put 'artificial-life' in the first category - we didn't have it and we didn't need it, but we now have it but don't need it - we'll now have to spend time and effort in sorting it out...

You can't undo split milk... so let's make the best of what we've got.

Humpmetwice

Has anyone thought about the movie coming out (Splice)? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfFI0xdwMyw

JuanV.Soler

we forget the basics
but we are going to learn them again
to share for getting survival
to share in first place, to share where we live in, as a whole.
The house is falling. There should be no more time than, to do the things that we have to do, in order to get the house calm tidy and clean. It seems that we do not love our life, as it is : to be born, to raise and to die; and some people keep pretending there is a lot of discoveries and attempts to improve our lives. But it is pointless. Would it be a better life if we become people who do not care people ? That path is the path we are on now and is leading us to the present complete failure.
blind people who cant see the smart world we already live in.

olishea

@unknownuser said:

I think the good that has come from scientific endeavour far outweighs the bad, though.

yeah i agree entirely, we gotta keep pushing the boundaries

mitcorb

We must be careful about restricting inquiry in areas of dubious utility. Yes, it is a double edged sword.
Sometimes the answers to legitimate needs come from these areas.

And I have personal reservations/ prejudices on what can be considered valid inquiry.

pyroluna

Why do people always want to invent artificial life? Does it have benefits? You can't clone a human and then harvest his organs. A cloned human would be a human just as a regular-born human would.

What's wrong with natural life anyway? Is it not precious enough?

pbacot

@unknownuser said:

Why do people always want to invent artificial life? Does it have benefits? You can't clone a human and then harvest his organs. A cloned human would be a human just as a regular-born human would.

What's wrong with natural life anyway? Is it not precious enough?

I gather from the reports that "all" they have done (and I mean to delineate and not demean the achievement) is to create a bacterial chromosome from scratch that when injected into a matching bacterial cell will allow the cell to function as it would regularly. What is meant by "synthetic" may mean they built up the chromosome, including all the correct genes, from DNA or RNA bases. (But these bases could have been derived from organisms, I don't know, as the enzymes used in the process were probably derived from life).

I think the reason they would follow this research is to have more ability to manipulate organisms into doing the work we want and not only a Frankenstein fantasy. Some would say just as we do with breeding, GMO, and many genetic manipulations already for food and medicine. Ultimately they might use this research to augment gene therapy for humans who are sick. But the debate continues, is this really an extension of something like plant breeding or going too far. I am personally very much pro- organic food, farming, and so forth but frankly I am still watching GMO debate skeptically, having a degree in biology. On the face of it, it is basic science, but there seem to be big problems, and not necessarily related to anything wrong with the organisms themselves.

Congratulations on your modeling win, Martha.

Peter

tim

@unknownuser said:

Why do people always want to invent artificial life? Does it have benefits?
/quote]
Curiosity - to see if they understand enough about the makeup of the genome and chemical synthesis to be able to do it. Financial reasons - someone paid them to try, and/or they think they see a way of making organisms with properties not available in the currently known natural state. To piss off religionauts.

@unknownuser said:

You can't clone a human and then harvest his organs. A cloned human would be a human just as a regular-born human would.

I can almost guarantee that if cloning (which this work was not an instance of) a human were shown to be viable the religionauts would shriek and wail about how this clone had no soul and could not be a proper human and on and on. Then some of the more avaricious ones would realise that this gave them the perfect excuse to return to slave owning.

@unknownuser said:

What's wrong with natural life anyway? Is it not precious enough?

Precious? Have you not noticed how life treast life? Not seen how pretty much every plant, fungus and animal eats other living things without pity?

remus

@tig said:

I'd put 'artificial-life' in the first category - we didn't have it and we didn't need it, but we now have it but don't need it - we'll now have to spend time and effort in sorting it out...

Come on TIG, no one actually knows what'll come out of this, so surely its a little premature to say we dont need it.

TIG

Remus
I know that 'no one knows what may come of it' - but we could always make many many things, but we choose not to do so - because we instinctively feel we shouldn't do them - like 'incest and morris-dancing' - to quote somebody else... Who knows what might come of such 'concepts' - many of us think, 'insufficient good'...
You shouldn't simply do something because you can: you should do it only after some deliberation.
Seems to me that no one asked 'us', 'Should we create artificial life ?' - they just did it.
OK, perhaps it will be the 'best idea any one ever had' - and I don't really bracket it with 'incest' - BUT we have managed pretty much to screw up the earth's life and ecology we already had, ready-made for us, so I hold out little hope for us doing anything better with this new set...
Wouldn't our limited resources have been better directed towards using and resolving what we already had - life/ecology/biology/health/etc/etc rather than something additional that [initially at least] offers us nothing immediately, but which could produce untold new problems, when we are struggling to cope with the myriad problems we already have ?
I am not against new ideas or advances in science - leave that to the 'fundamentalists' on all sides... BUT seems to me that this latest idea is akin to the middle-ages experts debating 'how may angels could fit on the head of a pin' whilst civilization/common-sense crumbled around them....

remus

@tig said:

You shouldn't simply do something because you can: you should do it only after some deliberation.
Seems to me that no one asked 'us', 'Should we create artificial life ?' - they just did it.
OK, perhaps it will be the 'best idea any one ever had' - and I don't really bracket it with 'incest' - BUT we have managed pretty much to screw up the earth's life and ecology we already had, ready-made for us, so I hold out little hope for us doing anything better with this new set...

I highly doubt that humankind has the capacity to sort out the problems we have created for ourself with the current body of knowledge, so we may as well keeping pushing forward (hows that for a weak argument!)

@unknownuser said:

Wouldn't our limited resources have been better directed towards using and resolving what we already had - life/ecology/biology/health/etc/etc rather than something additional that [initially at least] offers us nothing immediately, but which could produce untold new problems, when we are struggling to cope with the myriad problems we already have ?

I disagree. I dont think the pursuit of knowledge is ever a bad thing in itself, and at this time that is all it is. Speculating about the possible problems and/or benefits caused by something that is years away from existence is a waste of time in my opinion, we have nothing to base our opinions on, we are just imagining.

Secondly, why stop pushing the boundaries just because problems that have always plagued humankind continue to do so? We havnet been able to solve these problems so far, and i highly doubt its due to a lack of investment in those areas.

@unknownuser said:

I am not against new ideas or advances in science - leave that to the 'fundamentalists' on all sides... BUT seems to me that this latest idea is akin to the middle-ages experts debating 'how may angels could fit on the head of a pin' whilst civilization/common-sense crumbled around them....

Last time i looked out the window the world was still in pretty good nick, all things considered.