Charles Darwin and his Magic Barrel

[billymills]

http://www.harunyahya.com/kids/magic_barrel01.html

I just read this today and thought it was worthy of discussion.


What exactly constitutes 'creating life?'
Is this discovery really all it's cracked up to be, or do you think there will be numerous setbacks when actually trying to produce anything useful out of it?

If anyone wanted to discuss the story, sorry that's not really relevant.

 

[cantab]

It's not really creating life from scratch, it's copy-and-paste. Being cross-species is kind of interesting, but we've done the same kind of thing before.

 

[Ballad]

does this mean that we can create bears programmed to be trainable pets

 

[Deck Knight]

Replicators.

That was the first word that came into my mind when I heard about this yesterday. This isn't creating life so much as it is modification of it. They had to do a serious amount of genetic engineering on both ends to "reboot" a cell and change it's species. This looks like the functional equivalent of a trojan that goes into your computer system and changes your settings.

Which is not to say it isn't an epic scientific leap. The biggest problem would be if the re-coded bacteria got loose and started giving people diseases.

The only way to "create life" at current is to be a living organism in the first place. The process of reproduction can be accelerated, decelerated, or modified by science but ultimately it requires pre-existing organic material.

It only makes me marvel more about how life was created in the first place. The shift from inorganic to organic is massive, and the first species wasn't made in a test tube under controlled conditions, either.

 

[ultimatellama]

Absolutely. What's been done is...well, it's certainly very clever, but the press seems to be heralding it as the greatest leap forwards ever etc....

DNA already knows how to replicate, so they've not done anything 'new' just made old stuff do the same thing as it was always designed to do. Using old stuff in new ways. It's like sliced bread. Bread came unsliced, but now we can make it sliced. It's still bread. Have we made new bread? No.

This is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve already, but it's certainly not the creation of life. Even creating a single living cell is still far FAR beyond our grasp.

Conclusion: welcome scientific progression, but don't get too excited about this one.

 

[cantab]

I think I start to understand the significance of this now. They've been able to synthesise a "full-size" genome in the lab, under their control. Now, the genome they synthesised is a copy of an existing genome - though not an exact one, apparently they added some extra "watermarks" including one that encodes a URL. But in principle it need not be an existing one.

In a sense, we could develop the biological equivalent of a compiler. A means to take a sequence of base letters (and other ancilliary data) and create a living (or unable to survive!) organism using that sequence as its genome. But we are still nowhere near fully understanding what a given genome will DO. We may be able to create an arbitrary protein, but can we specifically create one to do a particular task, without copying nature? (Again taking an analogy from software, to truly claim to have created life from scratch 'clean room engineering' practices would have to be adopted, where the creators know no specifics of existing life)

 

[Scoopapa]

I think I start to understand the significance of this now. They've been able to synthesise a "full-size" genome in the lab, under their control. Now, the genome they synthesised is a copy of an existing genome - though not an exact one, apparently they added some extra "watermarks" including one that encodes a URL. But in principle it need not be an existing one.

In a sense, we could develop the biological equivalent of a compiler. A means to take a sequence of base letters (and other ancilliary data) and create a living (or unable to survive!) organism using that sequence as its genome. But we are still nowhere near fully understanding what a given genome will DO. We may be able to create an arbitrary protein, but can we specifically create one to do a particular task, without copying nature? (Again taking an analogy from software, to truly claim to have created life from scratch 'clean room engineering' practices would have to be adopted, where the creators know no specifics of existing life)

I know a lot of work is being done on ultra-realistic particle physics simulations that can mimic the chemistry of biological processes. Currently it takes something on the order of days or weeks to render a complex process, but if computers / the software got faster, we could have a way of actually testing and tinkering with this stuff. That way, scientists (or kids with computers) could tweak the code until it yielded a protein that folded just the way they wanted it to, with the right properties. I look forward to / fear the day that we can "build" with flesh and bone.

The future is going to be exciting.

I don't really get what this has to do with Darwin though.

Is this discovery really all it's cracked up to be, or do you think there will be numerous setbacks when actually trying to produce anything useful out of it?

This discovery is the result of many smaller discoveries, so it's tough to say whether it's "all that it's cracked up to be". Cumulatively, maybe so, but it's also certainly not the last we'll hear of this research. Future projects may be even more significant. As for the numerous setbacks, definitely. Pretty much any endeavor worth undertaking has numerous setbacks.

 

[Surgo]

It's not really creating life from scratch, it's copy-and-paste. Being cross-species is kind of interesting, but we've done the same kind of thing before.

Really? Where did we do the same kind of thing before?


People are heralding it as a huge scientific achievement because it is. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if we made the entire cell from scratch or just bootstrapped it from an existing cell. The best analogy here seems to be one from computer science -- say you just designed a new C compiler. Now, before you can actually get it to compile things, like itself you have to...compile it. It obviously can't compile itself without already being compiled. This is known as the bootstrapping problem.

There are two ways to deal with the bootstrapping problem: you can create a tiny compiler in assembly to compile yours, and then compile your own with your compiled compiler again to complete the process. Or, you can take an off-the-shelf compiler, then compile yours with that, then finally compile your own again with your compiled compiler to complete the process.

This research did the latter method. And it's pretty obvious to see why if you think about it -- if you're doing genetic engineering, it doesn't matter if you made the whole cell from scratch or you just used an existing cell to bootstrap your genome. The end result is the same, and the end result is what we care about, so why on earth wouldn't you take the easier road? The interesting part is the genome you just inserted (the compiler you just made) and the fact that you now have new cells made from that genome (have a compiled version), not how you got it there (compiled it).

 

[cantab]

Really? Where did we do the same kind of thing before?

I had in mind stuff like when one lot of DNA has been removed from a cell nucleus and replace it with another. I think it's what they do in cloning. Can't recall the exact details, I'd imaging they're a lot different to this recent work.

The media tends to seize upon certain science stories, and sometimes blows them a bit out of proportion, while other developments go unnoticed by the general public. This recent development is being a bit hyped IMHO.