We have Become Gods ,Scientists Create first Synthetic Living Cell

It was only a mater of time but today comes the announcement that Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first synthetic living cell .

The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell. The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA. The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms. The researchers hope eventually to design bacterial cells that will produce medicines and fuels and even absorb greenhouse gases.

The breakthrough is being hailed as a New industrial revolution.

But critics say that the potential benefits of synthetic organisms have been overstated. Dr Helen Wallace from Genewatch UK, an organisation that monitors developments in genetic technologies, told BBC News that the use of synthetic bacteria could be dangerous. "If you release new organisms into the environment, you can do more harm than good," she said. "By releasing them into areas of pollution, you're releasing a new kind of pollution. "We don't know how these organisms will behave in the environment." Dr Wallace accused Dr Venter of playing down the potential drawbacks. "He isn't God," she said, "he's actually being very human; trying to get money invested in his technology and avoid regulation that would restrict its use."

Call me a Luddite if you will but this gives me a very uneasy feeling .
news.bbc.co.uk...

Came here to post this. Live press conference can be seen here!

The implications of this are enormous! In the future we may be able to bioengineer organisms from scratch, that do exactly what we want them to.. Biomachines!

I love this.

reply to post by Thain Esh Kelch


That's true but as Frankenstein discovered to his cost these creations can turn round and bite you on the butt .
I am not sure humanity has the maturity to be playing with this stuff just yet , how long till the military decides that this could be the ultimate weapon .
This could be bigger than the A-Bomb

I agree with Thain Esh Kelch this is important news and a big step for humanity, imagine a man made bio-organism released into the human body that target and destroy cancer cells, this is just one example but the medical implications here are certainly vast.

Remain Vigilant

[edit on 20-5-2010 by bonsaisert]

scary to say the least...we now can create life? Havent all the scifi movies warned us that this never works?

reply to post by bonsaisert


Or imagine a man made bio-organism designed to kill according to preset Bio map of ethnicity , gender and age .
I can see the positives , and in an ideal world I would probably see this as a good thing for humanity , but I'm afraid in the world of Nationalism , greed for resources and downright corruption I fear the worst .
It has been said that future wars will be fought over water , with this Tech you could poison water to all but your own people .

What a sad/misleading title!

If you pay attention to the news, they used a NATURAL cell, and injected a synthetic dna.

reply to post by gortex



Wow, that’s somewhat pessimistic gortex…

You do have a good point though; the potential military applications of this are indeed daunting. I feel that if it came to that there would be little one could do to save oneself short of becoming a biomechanical engineer and developing some form of defence. Plus, far easier to just press a button and fire of a few nukes, those things have sell-by dates you know…

Remain Vigilant

wow, so they did it ...

Darwin will be turning in his grave
Kurtweil will be jumping up and down
Orwell has left the building
and Gods throwing darts 'Synthia'

The world is about to change.



[edit on 20/5/10 by Smiggle]

Yay! Humanity will be so much better now that we can introduce synthetic bioweapons into our growing list of technological atrocities!

Scientist used other creations of God to make something else.

Leave God's cells and other things alone and go get your own ingredients.

This new discovery is just playing with God's creations.

Man cannot create anything. Man can mix and match and come up with what might be a monster or the cure for all disease but the ingredients were here already created by God.

God did give man the ability to think and reason and use what He had already made for us.

reply to post by lifeinthematrix


The cell is just the bag the are using to hold the Tech , the main point is what is contained within that bag .

Originally posted by gortex
reply to post by Thain Esh Kelch

 

That's true but as Frankenstein discovered to his cost these creations can turn round and bite you on the butt .
I am not sure humanity has the maturity to be playing with this stuff just yet , how long till the military decides that this could be the ultimate weapon .
This could be bigger than the A-Bomb

Yeah, but even a fork can be a deadly weapon, so I'm not really that pessimistic..

reply to post by Thain Esh Kelch

Thain Esh Kelch
Yeah, but even a fork can be a deadly weapon

Thats true , but a fork is just a weapon , not a WMD .
This Tech has the potential to be a WMD either by design or accident , and accidents happen , remember the fears over a potential accidental release of Nanobots when they were considered the next big thing .

Dr Helen Wallace from Genewatch UK, an organisation that monitors developments in genetic technologies, told BBC News that the use of synthetic bacteria could be dangerous. "If you release new organisms into the environment, you can do more harm than good," she said.

Blah. Just make 'em so that they can't synthesize all the amino acids they need. Then they need the others from the environment. If they need most of their amino acids from the environment then they're at great disadvantage and will die away as soon as people stop adding those amino acids. Also make 'em so that horizontal gene transfer can't occur and consider problem solved. Craig is pretty smart. I'm sure he has thought of this. Helen should just shut up. She's not a biologist and thus doesn't know what she's talking about..

btw. they didn't really make new life, instead they made a copy of a genome and after some modifications inserted it into another cell.

[edit on 20-5-2010 by rhinoceros]

look at the state of the world today, and tell me that you would trust your governments to do the right thing with this technology.

you could speculate ad nauseum how this tech could benefit all types of life, but unfortunatly, psycopaths are the ones who attain positions of power and it just wont be used for any benevolent purposes.

call me a pessimist or a downer, but i have not seen anything to suggest this will end up benefitting humanity in any way.

reply to post by BlesUTP

At best (in short time) it'll make some processes more efficient. There are already over 500 commercial enzymes and metabolites that are made with modified cells.

[edit on 20-5-2010 by rhinoceros]

Originally posted by dizziedame
Scientist used other creations of God to make something else.

Leave God's cells and other things alone and go get your own ingredients.

This new discovery is just playing with God's creations.

Man cannot create anything. Man can mix and match and come up with what might be a monster or the cure for all disease but the ingredients were here already created by God.

God did give man the ability to think and reason and use what He had already made for us.

Indeed. I always find it laughable when anyone says they created something.

I think there is this amazing law that talks about conservation of energy and isolated environments and..

well, I won't ruin the surprise.

It's garbage. Synthetic DNA is a waste of time. It comes from what is already here. The "software" is a program which already existed.

Or did I miss the part where it said that scientists learned how to make the programming in the software more efficient...?

It is important to note that they basically copied the organisms own DNA from scratch and inserted that into the cell; i doubt very much any alterations were made since it seems to me that they just wanted to see if it could work with totally replicated DNA. Of course it does prove in theory that altered and totally replicated DNA couold potentially work. There is still a long way to go to have successful re-designed DNA. This is in other words still a big software problem.
I am curious as to the legal implications; does totally replicated DNA become to total property of the owner? Was this done in order to circumvent laws concerning ownership of DNA?
This story also helps partially explain another older story -
www.disinfo.com...">DARPA plans for synthetic weaponized lifeforms

I had thought at that time that DARPA would not have approved funding unless it was at least potentialy feasable and I wondered what they were basing it on. This story helps explain part of that.

Morally it s probably reprehensible, but the technology itself it ambiguous, neutral - its what purposes we as people put it too that matters. Of course there is always Checkov's Gun: a gun introduced in the first act of a play must go off by the third.

Originally posted by lifeinthematrix
What a sad/misleading title!

If you pay attention to the news, they used a NATURAL cell, and injected a synthetic dna.

Exactly.

And we're not gods FYI. Just humans.