On May 22 2010 02:56 Destro wrote: what about terraforming mars via synthetic micro organisms ;o
One would assume at this stage synthetic microorganisms would be less stable than natural ones
Mars has no magnetic field (thats huge btw, makes life basically impossible) and next to no atmosphere, regional temperatures over a year vary by 80-100 degrees celsius. But yeah, its a nice sci-fi plot that perhaps holds some ground a couple centuries into the future
Scientists have today announced the discovery of fire. This is a great step in our scientific knowledge and civilization development, but there are many ethical concerns that this new discovery could backfire and take lives, or even be used against peaceful people....
I'm liking the way Dr. Venter has built a solid foundation in the last 13 years for his research and I'm not that happy that his research focused straight on a viable organism. Of course, as compared to other labs that try to recreate lifeforms (by starting even lower with amino-acids and simple RNA), he is focused on obtaining a new slave form: the worker bacteria.
Since our mech nanotechnology can't draw chemical energy from any environment and does not have auto-replication mechanisms, we must focus instead on less useful and less efficient technology that has this ability.
On May 22 2010 10:43 ArKaDo wrote: Yeah seem very interessant and dangerous. What is life is NOT a biological question, it's a philosophical one... that's the problem in my point of view.
Seriously, the idea of "improving evolution", and "improving people" is very very scary.
Anyway LOL at the guy saying you actually need to know biology to say this is dangerous : you are morons. And LOL at the guy saying "improving evolution" is the same as medecine...
Can't you see that it is a dangerous idea just to "improve evolution"; cauz you need to define what you need to improve (need two legs? change dna so that people are not violent? just read Huxley guys...).
PS: when the guy is saying "playing god" he is not referring to god like the christian or islamic god or anything (well maybe he is but that is not the point), he is referring to an entity who is omnipotent: who knows everything and can control everything. That's not the case of humanity and will never be. When you look at the possibilities of synthetic life, you can also (if you have a bit imagination) see all the bad that could come from such technologies. I will just quote spider man since that's the kind of quote you like you science freek: with great power come great responsabilities.
I thought they had schools in France. :S
Go tell your queen to attack us with your silly little king.
The guy said in the video that one of his goal is "improving life" and "improving the people", i mean come on...
On May 22 2010 10:43 ArKaDo wrote: Yeah seem very interessant and dangerous. What is life is NOT a biological question, it's a philosophical one... that's the problem in my point of view.
Seriously, the idea of "improving evolution", and "improving people" is very very scary.
Anyway LOL at the guy saying you actually need to know biology to say this is dangerous : you are morons. And LOL at the guy saying "improving evolution" is the same as medecine...
Can't you see that it is a dangerous idea just to "improve evolution"; cauz you need to define what you need to improve (need two legs? change dna so that people are not violent? just read Huxley guys...).
PS: when the guy is saying "playing god" he is not referring to god like the christian or islamic god or anything (well maybe he is but that is not the point), he is referring to an entity who is omnipotent: who knows everything and can control everything. That's not the case of humanity and will never be. When you look at the possibilities of synthetic life, you can also (if you have a bit imagination) see all the bad that could come from such technologies. I will just quote spider man since that's the kind of quote you like you science freek: with great power come great responsabilities.
I thought they had schools in France. :S
Go tell your queen to attack us with your silly little king.
On May 22 2010 10:43 ArKaDo wrote: Yeah seem very interessant and dangerous. What is life is NOT a biological question, it's a philosophical one... that's the problem in my point of view.
Seriously, the idea of "improving evolution", and "improving people" is very very scary.
Anyway LOL at the guy saying you actually need to know biology to say this is dangerous : you are morons. And LOL at the guy saying "improving evolution" is the same as medecine...
Can't you see that it is a dangerous idea just to "improve evolution"; cauz you need to define what you need to improve (need two legs? change dna so that people are not violent? just read Huxley guys...).
PS: when the guy is saying "playing god" he is not referring to god like the christian or islamic god or anything (well maybe he is but that is not the point), he is referring to an entity who is omnipotent: who knows everything and can control everything. That's not the case of humanity and will never be. When you look at the possibilities of synthetic life, you can also (if you have a bit imagination) see all the bad that could come from such technologies. I will just quote spider man since that's the kind of quote you like you science freek: with great power come great responsabilities.
I thought they had schools in France. :S
Go tell your queen to attack us with your silly little king.
My god you're retarded.
You are retarded, midget. "silly little king" is a taunt from a french soldier to the english king in the monty python.... i was joking
On May 22 2010 07:45 OneFierceZealot wrote: in simple terms can someone explain why this is a big deal? or what is this even?
You have to learn how to crawl before you can learn how to walk and learn how to walk before you can learn how to run.
ah thanks man helps a lot.
In the past, to genetically modify a mouse/rat/yeast/bacteria/whatever, we would have to splice (cut/paste) DNA using these things called 'restriction enzymes.' (or infect the genome into a host with a virus vector). It's a huge pain in the ass because they are dependent on recognition sequences that we have to design.
With this technology we could create our own genome from scratch and transplant it into animals. It makes things much faster, and gives us more access to the genome.
You think creating genomes from scratch is less of a pain in the ass than finding appropriate enzymes and designing the primers? REALLY?
The current issue of the economist has great information on this subject and explains some more of the practical applications of this technology, and some of the problems that my arise from it, but in short this is just the first step in a new field.
Imagine growing an organism on the moon that gets its energy from solar radiation, it's nutrients from rocks, and spits out hydrocarbons as byproducts.
Are you suggesting that they would be able to transmute something that isn't hydrogen/carbon/oxygen into something that is?
You don't think those elements are on the moon? The lack of an atmosphere is certainly a problem, but not one that can't eventually be overcome in one way or another.
2008: Craig Venter claims to invent artificial life. And by that he means he took the smallest genome and cut out some things which were unnecessary, and called the remainder man-made artificial life.
2010: Craig Venter claims to invent synthetic life. AFAIK he took the thing from 2008 and rebuilt it using custom nucleotide incorporation, which is a standard technology for a while now on a typically 1/1000 smaller scale.
So I am 99% sure he just redid something which was not artificial life in 2008, and redid it in a pain in the ass way only a large corporation could do, for the sake of claiming they created "synthetic life" and "heralded a new era"? How humble.
It seems funny they try to give off the image you can code a genome like you can write a code when they say they have gone from digital computer information to a functional genome.
Will this artificial organism here do anything itself besides model a large scale gene transplant?
What will the uses be?
What do you learn genetically from this approach?
What will you be able to do with a "artificial organism" better than with the many modified organisms using current approaches? I.e., if someone wants to convert greenhouse gases as this guy does, is there a reason why it would be better to have a chromosome painstakingly derived and created in a time consuming manner from a small parasitic bacteria-which has nothing to do with this proposed function-as opposed to the use of a number of existing bacteria which have can already be manipulated into catalyzing such reactions?
Just because he COPIED an existing genome and put it back into a cell in a roundabout way does not mean he has control to make synthetic organisms that do whatever he wants. I just see a preliminary work in the methods addition of very larger than normal genetic elements into cells. Which is good... but what kind of douche who deletes portions of an existing, small genome and claims to create artificial life and even more sickenly boastful things.
On May 22 2010 07:45 OneFierceZealot wrote: in simple terms can someone explain why this is a big deal? or what is this even?
You have to learn how to crawl before you can learn how to walk and learn how to walk before you can learn how to run.
ah thanks man helps a lot.
In the past, to genetically modify a mouse/rat/yeast/bacteria/whatever, we would have to splice (cut/paste) DNA using these things called 'restriction enzymes.' (or infect the genome into a host with a virus vector). It's a huge pain in the ass because they are dependent on recognition sequences that we have to design.
With this technology we could create our own genome from scratch and transplant it into animals. It makes things much faster, and gives us more access to the genome.
They used restriction enzymes ........ and will still have to. Their method was a huger pain in the ass by far...
What part of the genome are you going to have more access to? If you are copying a preexisting genome and putting it back in a cell... What has shown "more access" in comparison to current abilities?
You are not going to code a new gene that is not basically mostly a preexisting gene, no one can do that in any significant way. And you can already transplant a number of genes, or remove them, or use slightly modified ones.
On May 23 2010 11:04 Servolisk wrote: Just because he COPIED an existing genome and put it back into a cell in a roundabout way does not mean he has control to make synthetic organisms that do whatever he wants. I just see a preliminary work in the methods addition of very larger than normal genetic elements into cells. Which is good... but what kind of douche who deletes portions of an existing, small genome and claims to create artificial life and even more sickenly boastful things.
It's a proof of principle. He said it himself during his press conference that this is just the first step and now he can actually start the experiments that he sought to do 15 years ago when he started the project.
On May 23 2010 11:49 Servolisk wrote: Such as what?
How do you get from this to designing bacteria doing w/e like converting greenhouse gases (in a new way)?
He still wants to create a minimal genome to use as a base for engineering other functions. This will facilitate that because you can delete and add hundreds of genes at once. The techniques could also be used to design and synthesize whole chromosomes to complement an existing cell.
Obviously, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome in the field, but converting a large digitized sequence to an actual one is now possible and conceivably will be a powerful tool for synthetic biologists.
On May 22 2010 02:05 icystorage wrote: man playing God. i hope man doesnt abuse this if it gets more advanced
It's man being man, and nothing more. No need for illusions of grandeur.
A company named Joule Unlimited managed to create an organism capable of using daylight and CO2 to make diesel. They expect commercial production by 2012.
2008: Craig Venter claims to invent artificial life. And by that he means he took the smallest genome and cut out some things which were unnecessary, and called the remainder man-made artificial life.
2010: Craig Venter claims to invent synthetic life. AFAIK he took the thing from 2008 and rebuilt it using custom nucleotide incorporation, which is a standard technology for a while now on a typically 1/1000 smaller scale.
So I am 99% sure he just redid something which was not artificial life in 2008, and redid it in a pain in the ass way only a large corporation could do, for the sake of claiming they created "synthetic life" and "heralded a new era"? How humble.
It seems funny they try to give off the image you can code a genome like you can write a code when they say they have gone from digital computer information to a functional genome.
Will this artificial organism here do anything itself besides model a large scale gene transplant?
What will the uses be?
What do you learn genetically from this approach?
What will you be able to do with a "artificial organism" better than with the many modified organisms using current approaches? I.e., if someone wants to convert greenhouse gases as this guy does, is there a reason why it would be better to have a chromosome painstakingly derived and created in a time consuming manner from a small parasitic bacteria-which has nothing to do with this proposed function-as opposed to the use of a number of existing bacteria which have can already be manipulated into catalyzing such reactions?
Just because he COPIED an existing genome and put it back into a cell in a roundabout way does not mean he has control to make synthetic organisms that do whatever he wants. I just see a preliminary work in the methods addition of very larger than normal genetic elements into cells. Which is good... but what kind of douche who deletes portions of an existing, small genome and claims to create artificial life and even more sickenly boastful things.
What I understand is that he wrote the genetic code from parts, he did not copy the whole thing, he created a new unique species from scratch. He basically added meta-information in it (website urls, decoding instructions for easter eggs) and injected this new code in an existing functional donor cell. Next division, the daughter cells are very close to the new species both in function and in structure. It is a man made design, it did not appear in a natural way.
What uses? Well he explained we can use them as cheap workers for chemical tasks, like cleaning stuff, creating oil, energy converters, maybe even food, disease inhibitors.... etc...
On May 22 2010 10:43 ArKaDo wrote: Yeah seem very interessant and dangerous. What is life is NOT a biological question, it's a philosophical one... that's the problem in my point of view.
Seriously, the idea of "improving evolution", and "improving people" is very very scary.
Anyway LOL at the guy saying you actually need to know biology to say this is dangerous : you are morons. And LOL at the guy saying "improving evolution" is the same as medecine...
Can't you see that it is a dangerous idea just to "improve evolution"; cauz you need to define what you need to improve (need two legs? change dna so that people are not violent? just read Huxley guys...).
PS: when the guy is saying "playing god" he is not referring to god like the christian or islamic god or anything (well maybe he is but that is not the point), he is referring to an entity who is omnipotent: who knows everything and can control everything. That's not the case of humanity and will never be. When you look at the possibilities of synthetic life, you can also (if you have a bit imagination) see all the bad that could come from such technologies. I will just quote spider man since that's the kind of quote you like you science freek: with great power come great responsabilities.
I thought they had schools in France. :S
Go tell your queen to attack us with your silly little king.
My god you're retarded.
You are retarded, midget. "silly little king" is a taunt from a french soldier to the english king in the monty python.... i was joking
EPT![[image loading]](http://ccrux.corsarius.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/starcraft%20kerrigan%20fan%20art%20by%20marek%20okon.JPG)
