zen_tom

This Article from BBC News

My personal take on this? I'm excited - Firstly by the news that it has been shown that life can indeed self-assemble from a chemical 'soup' and more so by the notion of designing cells that could be used to solve everyday problems in highly efficient and more organic ways. City liver anyone? Other uses might be the production of chemicals and enzymes to be used in medicine, among many many other exciting ideas.

mxyzptlk

Have you read Michael Creighton's "Prey"? Similar premise with scary consequences.

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zen_tom

No I havn't, though I do remember something in William Gibson's Idoru where a part of the Tokyo skyline was being transformed by some form of nanotechnology that was being used to erect new cheap housing - it was just a background element though, and nothing horrendous occured.

typhus

I agree with you zen_tom about this being good research for life assembling itself from a chemical soup. It shows that it is possible, not just an idea.

cataklysm

That's really interesting. Does anyone have any more information on this?

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Lak

Now THATS cool. And assembling a polio virus from standard issue chemicals, thats just way, way cool.
COOOL.
Can't wait to see where they go with it, maybe we'll have some kinda artificial bloodstream-dwelling cells that regulate insulin for diabetics? That'd be wicked hot.
On thought, they would probably get destroyed by antibodies just for being there... maybe theres a way to grow the artificial cell from a particular host dna.... hmmm.
I'm not very well versed in biology... I could be talking shit.
Failing to think of more practical applications.... anyone?

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zen_tom

I was thinking of industrial applications in the chemical industries - these things are basically tiny triggerable chemical factories.

So you can use them to produce chemicals in ways and places that you couldn't do before, or where the introduction of bacteria might cause problems.

One thing might be a special form of plastic seeded with these things that liquefies in the presence of an enzyme. Add another enzyme and the plastic hardens again. So in the recycling centre, you spray the enzyme onto the rubbish, the plasitc dissolves and is collected in a pit on the floor, cleaned, sent to the bottle factory, poured into moulds, given a dose of the hardening enzyme and pop, there's a new bottle.

Or you could develop cells that secrete calcium carbonates (borrowed from corals, or shelled molluscs) in order to build (grow) structures that wouldn't require workmen except for wiring or plumbing etc.

Later versions of these cells might be able to change shape in response to an electrical signal, the way muscle cells do. These types of cells could be used in machenery that mimiced the mechanics of the body.

The possibilities are pretty vast - I suspect though that currently they are difficult to produce in large numbers - a problem that might be solvable if they were built to self-replicate in addition to their other functions. What might happen then? A whole new branch of life?

fuzyfuzer

i think yu guys are going a bit far with this. these are brety limited structures and they don't have any DNA according to the article. all that they are capable of doing is to express a single protein/enzyme. it is much harder to enginer an entire organism because you have to work with a lot of genes, humans have 30,000 genes but we use at least 100,000 proteins/enzymes. this means we have genes that code for more than one protein. also i wouldn't call this artifical life as muc as i would call it a new species, because unless i am misunderstanding the article all they did was create a cell wall, take the organelles from e coli and then strip the genetic information so they could produce whatever they want. they didn't create anything artifical they just recombined what already existed.

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zen_tom

They are machines that construct complex proteins from the ingredients in the viscinity based on the blueprint found on an injected strand of DNA. Yes it is very basic(compared to what we're used to seeing in nature), and yes they are constructed from pieces farmed from elsewhere.

An analogy might be that each of these machines is like a cassette player (with no buttons) that plays the song of whatever cassette is put inside them once its plugged in.

The next step is to allow the cassette player to read longer tapes containing instructions (fast forward, rewind etc) as well as songs that respond to more complex button pushing from outside.

The analogy breaks down at the next step, since that would involve the cassette player reading the instructions on the DNA that tell it how to build another cassette-
player containing the blueprint cassette.

So 'life' may too strong a term, perhaps 'machines mimicing the processes of life' is more fitting. I do see the boundaries blurring considerably as more complex versions of these things are developed. In my opinion, this could be the start of an exciting new technology that really could change the world.

CSflim

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep.


You could take the precursor to pretty much any modern technology, look at it in its crudest, clunkiest form and scoff at it.

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archpaladin

I agree with the latter, but not necessarily with the former. The chemical 'soup' that we're thinking of is a set of already-complex and semi-ordered molecules. Even if science could manage to get these primitive cells to self-replicate, this new discovery in no way lets us claim that life can arise spontaneously from random components, since the alleged soup had an intelligent scientist choosing a specific chemical composition. Of course, if this is not what zen_tom meant in making this statement, then I'll just sit down and be quiet.

As to the designer cells.....that would be excellent. It would be a great opportunity to learn much about life and its complexity.

zen_tom

The soup of complex molecules from which life is thought to have emerged is something that brings itself about naturally. How? Because the reactions that produce those types of molecules are catalysed by the products of those reactions. In simple terms(I hope), complex molecules are more likely to be catalysts for the formation of molecules similar, or more complex than themselves, and because of this, any formation of such a self-catalysing molecule will propagate itself rapidy through the system, providing the chances for further degrees of complexity to occur, which will then further propagate, specialise and in turn add a new level of complexity...and so on.

Order comes for free in this universe.

Stiltzkin

I think the laws of thermodynamics would disagree.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about biology (yet) to say anything more than has already been said.

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zen_tom

Damn those laws of thermodynamics!

No but seriously, the auto-formation of increasing layers of complexity is something that temporarily flouts the laws of thermodynamics every day. Every time I pour a fresh cup of coffee, the lawyers in the court of thermodynamics leap up and shout 'Objection!' - and yes, they'll get me in the end, but not while I'm still alive and breathing.

mike059

My question is; once alive, is it still artificial?

fckm

Huh? Reference? Link?
As far as I know, the laws of thermodynamics are inviolable.

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CSflim

It's true. They are.
But in a very simplified manner: you absorb low entropy energy from the sun (or eat somehting which did this, or eat something which ate somehting that did this, or....)
Any energy you then release back into the environment is in the form of high entropy energy.
So though you appear to be "temporarily flouting the laws of thermodynamics", nature ensures that all of the check and balances are in place so that the environment pays the penalty.
The laws of thermondynamics only hold rigourously in a closed system, and you are not a closed system. You interact with your environment.

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zen_tom

The second law of thermodynamics states that over time, entropy increases, and ordered systems decrease.

So for example it's easier to break an egg than it is to put the pieces back together again; a concentration of heat in a pan will tend to dissipate into the air if left off the stove; and the pure gin will dissipate into the tonic water from the moment it is poured into the glass, as will the water from the melting ice.

What the second law tells us is that our bodies will wear out and die, that our strongest constructions will crumble, that our hard-drives will eventually crash.

However, while nature imposes these restrictions on life, purity, order and tidyness, it also, in the realms of self-organising processes, provides a means of countering these effects. The egg must be laid before it has a chance to be broken, the pan heated before it is allowed to cool, and the gin distilled before it has a chance to addle our conciousness. While those processes appear to be artificial and not of scientific interest, they are real natural processes (albeit of a higher order of complexity than our scientists prefer when doing their sums)

The universe creates order through the simplest of means - it turns out that some forms of organisation in turn help the formation of similar forms of organisation. Crystals form around a seed, planets form from within clouds of dust, stars ignite and provide energy to fuel organic reactions - at each step, the second law is being *temporarily* ignored.

If the universe is a closed system, and if the second law of thermodynamics is correct (and if our assumptions about time are correct), then our future will end as an amorphous, mixed-up place with no centre, no organisation, no concentration of anything that could be considered a feature. Some people think that a black-hole is an alternate description of a high-entropy system, but I don't know enough about that to comment.

However, there is this unrefutable ability of nature to balance it's own destructive power with this counter, organising, building one. We're living in a world where organisation is winning over disorganisation. Individually yes we all continue to die, but if the trend that we see on Earth could be applied to the rest of the universe (and this is a very iffy supposition to make) and organisation and self-replication continues to thrive in a universe that slips into disorder so readily, might the constructive force eventually outweigh the destructive one?

I know, it's late and this is starting to sound mystical, but coming back down to earth - my point is that if the 2LoTD says that things tend to disorder, there ought to be another law that describes this evident property of things to spontaneously order themselves. Here on earth that second property isn't doing too badly at all.

CandleInTheDark

Lets just say that I'm thinking about a doctorate in biology now.

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