Humans Create Synthetic Life!

Science fiction, my dear readers, has once again become reality.

Dr. Craig Venter and his team of researchers at Synthetic Genomics have created the first self-replicating artificial life, after 15-years of exhaustive, iterative effort and some 40 million dollars invested.

This artificial life started on a computer as a million-character DNA sequence, with all the known processes needed for self-replication and a pretty blue signature color, among other parameters.

The new DNA molecule was later assembled using the 4-base proteins of DNA (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine) from 50-80 character long snippets. These snippets were all put into a yeast carrier, where the base-pair proteins linked up and created the complete DNA sequence as designed.

Finally, the artificial DNA was inserted into a host bacteria (Mycoides), replacing the bacteria's original DNA with the artifical one. This new life basically 'booted up', which is to say, that bacteria became hardware driven by what was essentially totally custom software, complete with self-replication.

This new DNA sequence even had watermarks written on it for those who would want to independently verify this claim (since watermarks in DNA do not occur in nature). The watermarks were made possible via a code Venter and staff produced to write alphabetical characters into the DNA, spelling out whatever they wanted. Each team member had his or her name written into the code, and this would be expressed in every cell in the colony, ad infintum. In addition, there are three philosophical quotes and even a website URL for those who can 'break' the rest of the code.

Anyone who checks the DNA of this new artificial life can clearly see and prove its pedigree while they verify that indeed, humans really did create new life in the lab.

It was something humans had never done before.....they created life in the lab 'with ones and zeroes' as Dr. Venter put it. Now, there's one more new species to add to the world roster, and the first one with computer parents.

This is an incredible achievement, and no-doubt represents a huge paradigm change in what is possible from here on out. Drugs can be created now simply by designing and growing them, in self-replicating fashion, in house, and with amazing efficiency. Perhaps an artificial organism can be made which seeks out disease cells, from cancer to AIDS to the common cold. Flu vaccines can be made 99% faster than current technology allows, which by itself is incredible.

The sky's the limit. But, as is with any new technological advance, there will be fear. That's nothing new though, as throughout history, almost every human advance has been challenged, feared, perhaps outright shunned.

I'm sure we've all heard stories of the resistance to human autopsy, even anesthesia, or vaccination (there are many who still fear vaccination, and without good reason). Even birth-control in 2010 remains controversial for those stuck in the Bronze age or blindly following the ravings of Bronze-age shepherds (religion).

Any new technology can potentially be used for bad things, granted. Though it's no reason to forge ahead with technology governed by ethics. We must always work to prevent abuses whether it's using technology or sticks and stones.

As it is, humans are already inventive enough to find ways to kill each other...even if relegated to their bare hands. However, technology can save millions. We have to consider the tremendous benefit that technology has had and work to reform its abuses, and make it safer as we go. We've seen through history how the understanding of germ theory and vaccination has made it possible for literally millions of people to live with much less risk of preventable disease. However, we also see the ignorance of the anti-vax crowd reducing herd immunity, and actually helping to bring back diseases such as Measles, Mumps, Rubella or Polio which were nearly eradicated in most developed nations.

I fully expect people will fear Dr. Venter's artifical self-replicating bacteria just as humans have generally geared the unknown, and progress always is a step through the unknown. In the right hands, this will be an amazing tool for good and will benefit us all...it's going to be world-changing.

Some will accuse humans of 'playing god', but this was exactly the same sort of argument used to prevent child-bearing women from having the benefit of pain-relieving anesthesia, or have the choice of a medical procedure called abortion. It's the same religious dogma and fear-mongering which argued against human autopsy, or birth-control, even the equality of women, gays and minorities.

Even powered flight by the Wright Brothers in 1903 was seen as unnecessary by some, after all, if 'God' wanted us to fly, wouldn't we have wings? Thankfully, the anti-technology crowd was sufficiently ignored then just as we need to ignore it now in the purview of scientific understanding.

Until theists and those who invoke 'god' can bring any kind of rigor into their wild claims of space-fairies, they have no business making commentary about what their vaunted space-fairies say about real-world discoveries and the scientific method. Similarly, I don't care what someone thinks Vishnu, Zoroaster or the Galactic Overlord Xenu has to say about euthanasia or birth-control, and I don't care what some crazy loon believes Jesus has to say about artificial life.

On Discovery's 'Creating Synthetic Life: Your Questions Answered' special, they had a Catholic priest weighing in briefly on the repercussions of synthetic life, a man way out of his league surrounded by real scientists, or at least people who operate in the real world. The steely reception he got from the scientists around him was obvious to me, and the cold reception was appropriate. Nobody cares what a cabal of fairy-tale believers who routinely harbor known child-molestors has to say about science. Religion is simply irrelevant to anything in the natural world, given that their wild claims are completely unproved and unfounded. What a 'god' thinks of the affairs of science doesn't even begin to matter till someone can make a rational case that a god(s) even exists.

Those who seriously make claims about what a purported space-pixie has to say about science is a madman at the table of reason, and needs to be shown the door. Religion should have no place, no say and no control over science. What we find when religion gets involved, at any time in human history, is that religion invariably retards progress, and is always dragged into modernity after being pummeled into submission. Even when roundly defeated, religion tends to linger like a virulent mind-virus in the minds of otherwise reasonable people.

Superstitious mysticism has nothing to say regarding the affairs of real-world understanding. We need to noy only ignore the religious when it comes to matters of the natural world and scientific discovery, we need to ridicule them early and often when they pretend to speak for some super-diety which exists outside spacetime. We need to stop paying lip-service to the ravings of madmen out of a misguided sense of 'tolerance' or 'balance'. Otherwise, I fully expect to hear the Raelians, the Scientologists and everyone else weigh-in on this issue too (without all that giggling, I mean).

This doesn't mean that ethical concerns don't matter or shouldn't be discussed....just that our ethical concerns should be based in the real-world. This is why 'religion' and ethics are two different words, and one does not require or infer the existence of the other.

I applaud this latest success in our collective enterprise to further our understanding of the world around us. Dr. J. Craig Venter and everyone at Synthetic Genomics has made an amazing breakthrough, and this is truly *a historic moment in human history!

I can't wait to see what you and others do with this amazing new technology in the near future.

Sources:

Discovery Science Channel's 'Creating Synthetic Life'
Discovery Science Channel's 'Creating Synthetic Life: Your Questions Answered with Paula Zahn'
The Guardian (UK): Interview with Dr. J. Craig Venter


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*'an' historic is wrong. The 'H' sound in 'historic' is not silent, and thus, you would use the indefinite article 'a' in front of 'historic', since the indefinite article 'a' or 'an' is based on the sound of the following word and whether that 'sound' is a vowel or consonant.

Therefore, 'a historic' is correct. Likewise, 'an honor' is correct. The 'h' in 'honor' is silent, and thus has an 'o' sound at the beginning which is a vowel sound. An honorable, an onion, an uncle.

More examples: A universe, an umbrella. An orangutan, a one-time event, an octopus.

-dB-