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.