Synthetic Life
by MikeGeneIn any event, the feeling in Greenland was that bottom-up synthesis of anything remotely life-like is barely on the horizon, so that at present redesigning life is most usefully broached from the top down: by simplifying genomes to the point where they become a tractable chassis on which to build new machines. These might make fuels, for example, by digesting recalcitrant plant matter into ethanol or designer hydrocarbons; or they could use a suite of genes from plants and animals to assemble natural-product pharmaceuticals. This is already done to a degree in biotechnology, but the experience of Jay Keasling, at the University of California at Berkeley, of making bugs that produce the antimalarial artemisinin - a process requiring the orchestration of over 40 genetic components - shows how difficult it becomes in such a complicated synthetic pathway. All the same, Keasling anticipates seeing the drug go into production affordably by 2009.
Considerably more dramatic things are in store very soon: whole-genome transplants, where cells are 'booted up' with a new genetic operating system. (The details remain embargoed at the time of writing.) The next step is to do that with a fully artificial genome made by DNA synthesis. This would essentially mean starting life afresh for the first time in 3.5 billion years.
July 9th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
The official statement issued from the symposium is rather revealing.
Notice how the writers briefly invoke Miller-Urey as the impetus for the coming bioengineering revolution.
Then notice how quickly they abandon Miller-Urey in favor of the top down approach - otherwise known as "intelligent design".
Ball opines that "hardly anyone would deny" that life is emergent from raw chemicals. Indeed the "official statement" claims that Miller-Urey was as revolutionary as the invention of the transistor, or the discovery of the language of DNA, or the advent of nano-technology.
But the rest of the statement is a call to action to abandon the Miller-Urey approach and embrace the other three. Apparently the "tantalizing hints that we could create life from scratch" simply didn't pan out. Why then, is Miller-Urey mentioned in such glorified terms, and in such prestigious company? If 50 years ago Bell Labs had shown "tantalizing hints that transistors could be made from scratch", yet failed to ever produce one, would it be listed in this statement as one the great scientific revolutions? I don't think so. Scientific revolutions are sometimes born as tantalizing hints, but they are never sustained on such ethereal hopes and dreams. Such is Miller-Urey: a dream that never produced a scientific revolution, even if it did fuel a metaphysical one.
In my opinion, this is how ID will become a dominant paradigm. Scientists will simply tire of beating their heads against a rock, Venture capital will begin flowing away from things like the Harvard abiogenesis project and towards things like the Kavli project. The sheer elegance of the design paradigm will become more and more apparent, and chance will become a less and less attractive hypothesis as the design approach reveals in great detail the complexity of life. The paradigm shift will occur, like most things, as a result of simple economics, not politics, not metaphysics.
Comment by chunkdz — July 9, 2007 @ 1:15 pm
July 9th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Doug, it looks like my fault. The approve button is next to the spam button and I mistakenly clicked spam. It was a short message. Are you able to repost it?
Comment by Bradford — July 9, 2007 @ 1:57 pm
July 9th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
No problem, I'll repost it again. If you want to memory hole my "awaiting moderation question" post and this post, by all means.
I repost my original.
Thanks.
Comment by Doug — July 9, 2007 @ 2:44 pm
July 9th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Is this like Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT)?
Taking the nucleus of some somatic cell and placing it in an egg cell (which also had it's nucleus removed).
Comment by Doug — July 9, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
July 9th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
chunkdz:
Hardly anyone would deny a materialist miracle? Maybe He had a liquid lunch before murmering this.
It has the makings of a prediction too. Life, if it is intelligently engineered, will be done from the top down because the sobering reality is the bottoms up approach will never generate life.
Comment by Bradford — July 9, 2007 @ 5:54 pm
July 10th, 2007 at 2:01 am
This is pretty cool and as already noted it really is a pro-ID approach to the problem.
It seems like a bit of a cheat to call this synthetic life though. This seems a lot closer (even on the wholesale changes predicted in the future) as the equivalent of making modifications to a car (and you know how extensive they can be, and this is an acheivement in its own right) not building one from the ground up.
Comment by thesciphishow — July 10, 2007 @ 2:01 am