Posted on 05/30/2010 9:37:12 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Heralding a potential new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday.
"We call it the first synthetic cell," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. "These are very much real cells."
Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie of genetically engineered plants and animals. But the ability to craft an entire organism offers a new power over life, they said.
The development, documented in the peer-reviewed journal Science, may stir anew nagging questions of ethics, law and public safety about artificial life that biomedical experts have been debating for more than a decade.
"This is literally a turning point in the relationship between man and nature," said molecular biologist Richard Ebright at Rutgers University, who wasn't involved in the project. "For the first time, someone has generated an entire artificial cell with predetermined properties."
David Magnus, director of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, said, "It has the potential to transform genetic engineering. The research is going to explode."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Why do I get a “B-grade sci-fi film” vibe from this...
There are going to be some people who will claim this proves life began naturally. Just watch.
Liberals are a synthetic organism......Very similar to an amoeba.
If you are a molecular biologist that also believes in evolution, then you would believe that the artificial cell with predetermined properties would eventually evolve into something that is not pre-deterimined. And if you were an ethical molecular biologist that also believes in evolution, you would realize that this is not a good thing.
LOL!!! I left the thread, and got it about a minute later. Genius!!
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Actually, a line from Star Wars comes to mind:
"I've got a bad feeling about this..."
This just proves life began naturally.
Indeed!
Better a “B grade” sci-fi vibration than my first thought when I misread the title.
Indeed!
I just designed a self-replicating post.
I just designed a self-replicating post.
"The "orgasmatron" is a fictional device in the fictional future society of 2173 in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper. It is a large cylinder big enough to contain one or two people. ... Once entered, it contains some (otherwise undescribed) future technology that rapidly induces orgasms. This is required, as almost all people in the Sleeper universe are impotent or frigid, although males of Italian descent are considered the least impotent of all groups."
Very Funny.
Lol! Sorry, I misread “synthetic organism” as “synthetic ORGASM”!
I knew what you meant.
≤}B^)
What the press, most people, and even most scientists don’t realize is that the bulk of inheritable material received by a newly conceived multi-cell organism (or a single-cell animal created by binary fission) is not the genetic material itself, but the “other stuff” in the cell. The genetic material itself is little more than CNC-like instructions for stringing together amino acids to make various proteins. The “other stuff” is the actual factory for processing the instructions, and this other stuff is far more complex and contains far more information than the genetic material itself.
Furthermore, the DNA does not encode the structure of this factory. The factory structure is self-encoding, just like an Itanium CPU chip self-encodes. (By the way, saying something is self-encoding is just a fancy way of saying “it is what it is”, or simply that “it exists”.) However, unlike the Itanium CPU chip, there are available to us no external “plans” for this factory that tells us how to build one. Decoding the DNA is a relatively simple task, just as is the reverse engineering of binary computer code to figure out what it does. However, there is no “code” to reverse disassemble to determine the structure and function of the cellular factory. This can occur only by tinkering with it one brick and one screw at a time, and respresents a task that is thousands of times more difficult than decoding the DNA.
(Note that the only way a new cell receives its new factory is by direct transfer of parts of the old factory, sort of like when you cut an earthworm in half, and each half grows into a whole new earthworm. Or, again using the CPU chip analogy, such replication would be akin to a CPU chip having the ability to grow into two complete CPU chips if the original one was split in half.
As a further aside, the cellular factory and its DNA would have had to have been designed together from the very start, and neither one could have been made independently of the other, no more than it would be possible to independently invent the machine code used by an Itanium processor and the processor chip itself, though these two products contain infinitesimally less information than a living cellular factory and its genetic material.)
At any rate, designing and synthesizing some genetic material that can be made to function in an existing cell is quite an achievement, but is still equivalent to a cave man making a functioning machine-language boot loader, with no idea in the world how the CPU chip works or what an operating system is.
Certainly what was done does not count as creating life, not even close. Now if mankind could start with a shelf full of jars with various chemicals in them, and from that synthesize a completely self-replicating, self-sustaining cellular organism, then we’d be walking the walk, rather than just talking the talk!
What I haven't heard discussed very much is that whereas there is genetic information (in terms of DNA) for proteins and protein subunits, there is nothing remotely similar for higher level order; whether on the subcellular level of multi-protein molecular machines or on the tissue, organ, or whole organism levels of organization, both in terms of structure and function. One thing is certain, it is the pre-existing cellular/cytoplasmic environment that determines the manipulation of DNA for protein expression, not vice versa. Maternal (and perhaps even paternal) mRNA and pre-existing cellular machinery in the cytoplasm of the fertilized egg have a profound effect on subsequent gene expression and development. How a pre-existing cell uses the plans (and alternative splicings) for proteins to meet the constitutive needs of the cellular economy or to replicate a new individual (or a part of one, thinking of limb regeneration in lower level vertebrates) is where all the excitement is.
Ping to an interesting cellular origins and information discussion...
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Thanks sonofstrangelove. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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