In all seriousness, the dangers brought up in the article can only come from a person lacking significant knowledge of bacteria.
Unimaginable numbers of bacteria permeate every part of the world, including miles within the earth, deep sea volcanic vents, radioactive waste, the rain drops falling on our heads, and us, up our noses, in our skin pores, our guts, etc.
Those simple bacteria evolve at staggering rates, and swap genes like DJ Danger Mouse mixing tracks.
Any new synthetic, or extraterrestrial, or magical, life form would have to compete. And unless you believe in magic it is unlikely to out-compete in a pre-existing niche.
The grey goo danger often thrown at nano-tech, is possible only if we violate one or more of the basic laws of thermodynamics.
And when it comes to antibiotic resistant bacteria, well we are already doing a great job of breeding those within ourselves.
But if you grew a barrel full of MRSA and then poured it down your toilet, the SA wold quickly lose its metabolically expensive MR. Because there is no Methicillin in the sewer, the resistance to Methicillin is a disadvantage. And the only way the Staphylococcus aureus could survive is if it dumped this feature.
But luckily you're probably taking antibiotics so you are a niche where MRSA can out-compete and thrive.
Cars are faster than land animals. Planes are faster than birds. Not being constrained by needing to have come from slow gradual iteration might open some possibilities, some terrifying. Biology doesn't produce the wheel.
To consider this as a possibility is not to believe in magic.
There's no comparison.
I'm sitting here looking out the window at my car, and there are caterpillars out there that are moving faster than it. Not only that, but that caterpillar can refuel itself. And it'll turn itself into new ones next year. In the meantime, my car will sit and rust.
Really, it's the height of hubris to think that we can engineer something that works as well as what untold generations has evolved.
(And I'll apologize for the tangent, but this is also the fatal conceit of those who believe that any central authority can manage our economy any better than the market can on its own.)
Fuel, jet fuel.
Biology doesn't produce the wheel.
Tumble weeds? Insects which curl up into a wheel to quickly roll away from danger? Can a car drive up stairs?
Indeed if we genetically engineered a large animal to run on gasoline AND provided it with an ample supply of gasoline, it would move faster than anything else... as long as it had gasoline.
If we engineered a bacterium to eat oil and/or gasoline and dispersed in the gulf.... already there, eating oil, consuming the oxygen in the water in the process.
If we added it to an oil well... already there, lots of bacteria deep within the earth, eating everything from metal to methane. Probably not consuming the world's oil reserve only for lack of oxygen or any other oxidizer.
...some possibilities, some terrifying.
Ebola, HIV, the flu de jour all quite terrifying, all 100% natural.
And unlike you, they don't care. They will keep evolving and trying to kill you as fast and as hard as they can, every minute of every day.
However, there are some wheel-like things in biology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_s...
The risks should be taken seriously, even the seemingly far-fetched ones, but need to be viewed in the context of an already cut-throat competitive landscape. IMHO, the bigger risk is intentionally designing malicious life forms (bio-weapons) more so than than beneficial ones getting out of hand.
But really it bothers me in a different way. I'll say morally, for a severe lack of better term. Maybe existentially. It doesn't sit right with me that we'll be living amongst creatures created in a lab, and that there's no way to differentiate them. I don't believe in God, but I like that we exist within a certain biological framework, it just feels like part of our identity. That the players are allowed to change the rules bothers me.
But they only evolve to the brink of failure
http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2009/05/natural-protein-vs...
Making changes to the genome to accomplish some task is much harder to do.
The life form that Venter created is separate from that lineage - its genetic code was synthesized from basic building blocks, not copied from an ancestor (at least in a biochemical sense; the information content was indeed copied, but that's another hurdle).
Whether or not this makes it "artificial life" depends on your definition of "life", and there's a surprising amount of controversy there.
Edit: However, I know what you mean about it not being 100% artificial, as in completely designed by humans: Maybe "synthetic life" is better?
Further edit: More than using a pre-existing genome, what makes it not completely artificial is that they had to put their DNA into another cell, basically cloning using synthesized DNA rather than natural DNA.
(Natural vanilla is harvested from beans, resulting in vanillin, etc. Artificial vanilla is synthesized from e.g., bacteria, and in specific cases molecular synthesis.)
Though it is a bit overblown, but you know, science journalism.
Still a great feat, but not quite 100% "artificial life" yet.
However, the scientists did (according to the arstechnica article, posted above) have to remove a section of the DNA (something to do with the bacterium cutting DNA originating in yeast into small pieces... sigh, wish I understood this sort of thing). So they did actually make modifications to the genome, I think...
That said, people can sometimes go batty and start thinking something was achieved when it wasn't. I think it's reasonable to clarify that this isn't a full realization of "artificial life" just yet (though it clearly is a partial realization, as the scientists did alter the genome (also, apparantly they removed potentially disease-inducing strands of DNA, according to the NYTimes). The poster who got negged expressed this distinction in a fairly dismissive fashion that appeared to disparage the achievement. But you should be able to point out (diplomatically, one would hope)that a monumental achievement isn't an even more monumental achievement without being accused of minimizing the achievement itself!
Another one from Venter's website: http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replica... (on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364544)
So that the assembled genome would be recognizable as synthetic, four of the ordered DNA sequences contained strings of bases that, in code, spell out an e-mail address, the names of many of the people involved in the project, and a few famous quotations.
It's related to genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and the like.
It would be nice if the using-real-chemicals-and-alive-stuff hacking were called "synthetic life", or something to distinguish it from existing terminology.
Maybe. But if you end up with a living organism, then that it's not artificial life; it's life (albeit artificially manufactured) . Whereas the software stuff is never anything but artificial.
Long run I'd expect anything that's alive to be called life, regardless of the process that lead to it.
A certain Someone said once "Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth."
That certain Someone later said: "Behold, man has become like one of us..."
Walt Disney may have had a number of character flaws, but I always found the "if you can dream it, you can do it" quote very inspiring.
/card-carrying atheist, but always liked that joke
How do you physically put DNA into a cell? A very small needle? Or is there something fancier?
How were the synthesized pieces of DNA produced? Very tiny robotic hands pushing the molecules together in the right sequence?
How did they stitch together the synthesized pieces of DNA? What would say which pieces go with which?
The initial pieces of DNA (oligonucleotides) are synthesized chemically - the components are added to a reaction one at a time, and the reaction is controlled so that at each step, only one base gets added. There is a lot of chemistry optimization and QC to be able to make relatively long fragments accurately. They ordered the building block pieces (1080 bases long) from a company called Blue Heron, which specializes in putting together long DNA molecules.
The sequences were designed to be partially overlapping, so that the complementary sequences could fit together. Overlapping pieces of DNA can be combined by a process called homologous recombination. There is existing machinery in the yeast cells that they used to join together such complementary sequences. The molecules were assembled hierarchically, so they first made 10kb fragments, then put 10 x 10kb together to make 100kb fragments, and then finally put the 10 100kb fragments together. The overlapping sequences at the ends determined which fragments will stick together.
What's PEG? The electrical method you mentioned?
So if the DNA pieces overlapped did that overlapping base pairs somehow get removed when the pieces were joined? Otherwise I'd think the next final DNA sequence would look a lot different from what they were intending to copy.
DNA, as you probably know, is a double-stranded molecule, and the strands have complementary sequences. When the overlapping pieces are joined, one strand of one molecule overlaps with its complement on the other piece, and vice versa - the pieces aren't just joined end-to-end.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homologous_recombination for all the details.
What, you're still using your original telomeres?
This is great news, but with this new power comes also a very large responsibility.
(I am not currently well-informed enough in this area to either advocate or not this perspective, just providing it.)
Nature asks and eight experts comment on significance http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.255.ht...
