Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

[n2doc]

By Alexis Madrigal September 08, 2008 | 10:30:34 AM

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.
It's not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.
Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.
While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.
"We've made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide," Szostak said in a phone interview. "What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful."

more:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/biologists-on-t.html

[annabanana]

1. ok that is just weird..

Whatever is is (or will be) I'd rather not meet.

[phantom power]

5. Nothing especially terrible. Basically a synthetic bacterium.

[DS1]

2. Put it in the super collider!

:bounce:

[skoalyman]

3. and send it into the future

:evilgrin:

[Indenturedebtor]

4. Call me when it has 2 hemispherical fat deposits on it's abdominal cavity

and can manufacture a ham sandwich :P

No seriously this is awesome!

[SteppingRazor]

6. Isn't this about the time when, to put it in Douglas Adams terms...

God disappears in a puff of logic?

[FiveGoodMen]

7. That only works in books

In real life God is harder to get rid of than MRSA. (And more destructive, too).

[AnnaLouise]

8. many who call themselves biologists are necrologists

many who call themselves biologists are necrologists