Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Its life Jim but not as we know it...

Interesting article in Scientific American on artificial life, its written by Lawrence Krauss but refers to the work being done by Craig Venter on DNA sequencing. Over the last few years the cost of DNA sequencing has fallen dramatically and the time it takes has correspondingly fallen; much like the equivalent Moore's Law in computing we have seen an almost exponential fall in the resources required to pick apart the precise structure of these molecules. Venter's genius was to realise that in important ways Biology is really a branch of computer and information science, and could be cracked by applying silicon processing brute force.


In 2003 we saw a team under Venter create one kind of bacteria from another simply by messing with the genome, pretty soon we will see life itself (albeit bacterial) being created from a kind of chemical Lego set; molecules which weren't alive before the scientists started but will be alive after they are finished.

All of this research has some important safety overtones. Clearly we don't want to create a vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that then ravages the population, Ebola probably wouldn't make a good template! so we need to ensure that proper safeguards are in place to prevent it in the first place and deal with it if it does. However, the Frankenstein scenarios that I'm sure will be painted by the media are vanishingly remote, evolution deals up billions of genetic variations every day and our own immune systems have evolved (by mutation and selection) to cope with precisely this. We saw the same kind of paranoia over the LHC and supposed black holes that were going to consume the planet when it was switched on, the fact that equally high energy collisions happen all the time in our atmosphere seemed to pass most people by.

The other culturally interesting fall out from this research will be where it leaves religious people? Most of the mainstream religious categorically state that creating life is firmly in the supernatural omniscient entity department, that premise is almost certainly about to be shown to be incorrect. I wonder if this event will be handled in the same way as say, Galileo's discoveries regarding geocentricity, i.e. hostility and denial at first followed by begrudging acceptance and finally capitulation. I wonder how many years that process will take or whether in this highly connected world it will become insignificant in the light of the human benefits that such technology will give us. I do sense that the inevitable cycles of religious obstruction to scientific and ethical advances are shortening as the general population become more and more educated in matters of physical reality.

Another interesting but more trashy consideration is what the first artificial life form will be called, I wonder if Mr Venter's ego is sufficiently large that he names it after himself in the spirit of all those Linnean naturalists of yonder years who named plant and animal species after themselves and their copious offspring.

8 comments:

Gerrarrdus said...

On the heliocentric view of the universe (which is what Galileo was proposing) - the Catholic church does seem to have come down weirdly against him. There's no evidence of which I'm aware that the Protestants cared much one way or another - Kepler was a Protestant and nobody put him on trial. When all's said and done, everybody including other scientists opposes radical new theories until they're proved beyond doubt. Have a read on the archaeology of Stonehenge, for example.

If you could make a new life from chemical building blocks, in one sense cool - if it works it works.
It opens up all sorts of questions about safety, but think of the experimental fun you could have.
Current life sticks with the same bases for DNA, you could try others and see if they worked, you could try alternatives to DNA and RNA. After all, having evolved, they've tons of redundancy built in. Or you could build streamlined RNA and see if it replicates quicker. And then get out of the building as fast as you can!

Steve Borthwick said...

G, yes Catholics do seem to be more dogmatic about some things, it's interesting how the different perspectives develop, protestants in the USA (or a large number at least) seem generally hung up on literalism and Catholics in the "old world" seem more resistant to societal change but less worried about things like evolution.

I agree that a skeptical outlook is a good thing; scientists more than anyone require strong evidence for radical departures from established theories, but on the other hand they tend not to throw people in jail (or in the case of Giordano Bruno, burn them to death) for not agreeing with them ;)

It is mind boggling what advances could potentially be achieved with this technology, even at the simpler end of the spectrum, i.e. microbes that turn garbage into fuel etc. There's a school of thought that reckons life on Earth started with RNA and in a way I suppose a lot of it is still RNA based so I guess we're not exactly inventing more re-modelling; exciting times.

Gerrarrdus said...

RNA's much more genetically "loose" than DNA, so that would make sense, but must itself have bootstrapped up from something simpler again.
Scientists don't kill people for disagreeing with them - but then some secularists and atheists did and do, and for atheist principles. Lenin, Stalin and Mao to mention three. I think Jeremy Bentham was generally fairly pacific.

Steve Borthwick said...

G, I agree secularists and atheists can also be despots and psychopaths, in one way I suppose this fact supports a position that ultimately we're all just human beings, all subject to the same natural laws and natural flaws.

I read a paper not so long ago that proposed a mechanism for spontaneous RNA formation, here's the link

Chemist Shows How RNA Can Be the Starting Point for Life

Gerrarrdus said...

Thanks for that link, Steve. The synthesis is clever. Naturally suffers from the logical flaw that the scientists know what they're trying to find - whereas the first molecules that generated RNA, whatever they were, didn't. But you can't do better than try...

What seems even weirder - the Catholic Church was effectively rejecting Galileo on the basis, not that he disagreed with Scripture, so much as that he disagreed with Aristotle. That famous Christian!

Steve Borthwick said...

G, quite!, I suppose he was martyred which gives him a certain "street cred" in that faith perhaps?

Gerrarrdus said...

Aristotle? Natural causes. I thought he was just a beggar for the bottle.
Galileo was a kind of living martyr, I guess, along the lines of John the Divine. Great bloke, although I was disappointed to learn he never really threw things off the Tower of Pisa.

Steve Borthwick said...

G, You're right, I'm getting mixed up with Socrates, pah! all Greeks to me ;)

I did spit off the leaning tower of Pisa in my youth (when you were still allowed to climb up it) - my tribute to that famous experiment!