Scientists to create new life

Can you believe this?

Scientists Want New Form of Life

WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists intend to announce Thursday that they will attempt to create a new form of life in a laboratory dish, The Washington Post reported.

Gene scientist J. Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, a Nobel laureate, will announce their hopes of creating a single-celled, partially man-made organism with the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life.

If the plan works, the microscopic manmade cell will begin feeding and dividing to create a population of cells unlike any known to exist, the Post reported on its Web site Wednesday night.

The cell will be hobbled to render it incapable of infecting people — a step in ensuring safety, the Post said. It also will be confined and designed to die if it does escape into the environment.

The project could lay the scientific groundwork for a new generation of biological weapons. But Venter and Smith said the project could also help in the enhancing the nation's ability to detect and counter existing biological weapons.

More here.

Comments

It also will be confined and designed to die if it does escape into the environment.

Sheesh. And here I was worried about Gray Goo. But out of control microscopic robots are a decade away. This?

The future is now! (Yike!)

Seriously, though, this stuff intrigues me. It's scary, but amazing. Just today I heard a story on NPR on stem-cell research going on in Brazil (unfettered by U.S. regulations and Bush administration biases). Messing with mother nature rarely turns out well (nuclear weapons, anyone?), and yet, the promise and potential is mind boggling. "Organ farms" where every variety of body part and vital organ is grown were once the stuff of science fiction. Now we're in a position where law and ethics have to catch up with reality.

On the new life form, here's a more expanded story from The Washington Post. Less obsession with the "biological weapons" aspect (a category in which there's already a lot out there to worry about), and some clarification on the practical aspects:

...They will attempt to add new functions to it one at a time -- conferring on it the ability, for instance, to break down the carbon dioxide from power plant emissions or to produce hydrogen for fuel... The more immediate plan is to try to puzzle out, and eventually model in a computer, every conceivable aspect of the biology of one organism...

Also more background on the scientists, the connection to Celera (the private "human genome project" folks), and past work in the area.

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