We’re hearing the first stirrings of a big story: Craig Venter may have created the first organism with an artificially synthesized genome. Conceptually, building a strand of DNA and inserting it into a cell stripped of its genome is completely unsurprising — of course it will work, a cell is just chemistry — but it is a huge technical accomplishment.
Carl Zimmer has more background. I want to see the paper.
Cue the douche from Conservapedia demanding to see the evidence.
Very interesting breakthru indeed
Yes! Venter is the man.
As they say on the Intrawebs “+1 Hot Pr0n!”
WOW!!! Been waiting for this for a while. This seems to be a year or two delayed from their original schedule.
I’d gathered that they ran into a few problems. Those lightning bolts out of blue sky didn’t help either. Fortunately they missed by a few hundred miles and hit a church. Yahweh is notorious for poor aim.
Watch the fundies come up with more excuses and lies. Guaranteed to be amusing.
Here’s the paper in Science Express: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1190719
Ha, just proves that life had to be designed.
I’m sure that he must have designed parasites for that life, since of course that’s what intelligent designers do for inscrutable purposes.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Aha! Absolute proof that the genome could only have been created, since those scientists created it in the lab!</stupidity>
But seriously, I’m betting that claim has probably already been made by someone in all seriousness. If not, then it surely won’t be long.
Oh noes, Ventner killed God?
Raven, I don’t know about the fundies, but the idiots are already doing their bit:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-Synthetic-Life/122842021072292
First comment at Zimmer’s:
Classic.
Ing #1, the reply should be
If Conservapedia sends something back that isn’t actual evidence, it has to be rejected and clearly noted why it is being rejected.
Just a reminder:
Allegations are not evidence.
Hearsay is not evidence.
Unsubstantiated claims are not evidence.
Personal revelation is not evidence.
Anecdotes are not evidence.
Rumors are not evidence.
Wild speculation is not evidence.
Wishful thinking is not evidence.
Illogical conclusions are not evidence.
Disproved statements are not evidence.
Logical fallacies are not evidence.
Poorly designed/executed experiments are not evidence.
Experiments with inconclusive results are not evidence.
Experiments that are not and cannot be duplicated by others are not evidence.
Dreams are not evidence.
Hallucinations/delusions are not evidence.
Experiments whose methodology is not open for scrutiny are not evidence.
Data that requires a certain belief is not evidence.
Information that is only knowable by a privileged few is not evidence.
Information that cannot be falsified is not evidence.
Information that cannot be verified is not evidence.
Information that is ambiguous is not evidence.
I’m sure that Andrew Schlafly is pissing his pants. Of course, I suspect he does that every day anyway.
While Venter is kind of, hmmm, “not particularly personable,” in person, this is very cool, indeed. I’m sort of surprised that it hadn’t been done earlier, actually.
I’m curious to see how minimal a genome can be and still function.
Wow. I guess this means Craig Venter is God. Who knew?
@>:(}
I guess there’s only one reasonable thing to do.
HEAR YOUR HUMBLE SUPPLICANT, ALMIGHT VENTER! DESTROY MY ENEMIES, FILL MY BANK ACCOUNT WITH FOOLISH PEOPLES’ MONEY, AND HIDE MY SEXUAL PECCADILLOES FROM THE MEDIA!
#15 Wow. I guess this means Craig Venter is God. Who knew?
@>:(}
I don’t think Craig has ever had any doubt ;-)
I love this quote.
Bene Tleilax FTW!
So…how long before Venter clones himself…by writing his genome from computer disk into a new cell?
And does that mean that the computer disk has a soul?
Cheers,
b&
—
EAC Memographer
BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy
“All but God can prove this sentence true.”
Not worried.
1. Synthetic life will have a tough go competing with evolved life. AS awesome as this accomplishment is, until you evolve that sumbitch, it is a noob.
2. I am all for playing God. Let’s beat the demiurge out of the record books, is whamsayin.
DNA cloning and making chimeric organisms is ancient history.
Whole animal cloning is routine and you can have your old pet cloned.
In a few decades Synthetic Life will be old news.
So what is left? Artificial Intelligence, immortality, and terraforming other planets.
I can see the headlines now. It is 2060 and the first immortal mice are created. Religious leaders claim that this is blashemy, a discovery of the biblical Tree of Life. No one cares. They are too busy lining up for their treatment.
Supposedly, god kicked us out of Eden and confused our language at the Tower of Babel so we couldn’t become too powerful and smart. Didn’t work but the xian god has never seemed all that competent so it isn’t surprising.
Of course, what is really happening was pointed out by Carl Sagan. We humans light candles to push back the darkness. Venter and we just lit another candle.
I suspect I know who’s getting a Nobel Prize in the next few years.
Hurray!
Next step: fully artificial cell.
I am a layman, so bear with me. This sounds as if Craig Venter has made a huge stride toward truly synthetic life. Not genetic modification, but true genetic engineering from the genome upward.
This strikes me as a breakthrough of epic proportions. The potential medical applications alone are mind boggling. I had no idea that genetic science had advanced so far.
It truly is an exciting time to be alive.
Lets just hope that the politicians don’t mess it up by banning the technology/miss-using it for military purposes (I have an uncomfortable feeling that an ‘Oppenhiemer moment’ might be looming in the not-too-distant future)/restricting the research out of existence to placate the fundies.
It is a sad fact that whatever wonders science can discover or create can be abused by the greedy or power hungry. Knowledge is always good, it is just unfortunate that there are always morons waiting to pervert it, or fearful idiots eager to ban it. I am thinking about the whole “LHC will create a blackhole and kill us all” scare.
OK, where are the thunder and lightnings, the mad cackling and the sidekick with the squint and hunchback? Modern makers of “life from the lab” are sooo mundane…
;-)
So, we have an argument from science fiction movies. The “Oh noes! Genetically-engineered kill-monsters will eat us all!” scenario. I suppose we need to be careful not to create something dangerous once we start doing that kind of modification, but a dangerous, treatment resistant virus seems more likely than a zombie-apocalypse. In any case, it seems likely to me that it will be a loooong time before we start doing anything that could result in any significant threat.
The second argument, that humans are stepping on god’s toes, and infringing on some supposed divine monopoly on the creation of life, so we as a species are cruisin’ for a smitin’, is your usual fundie nonsense. ‘Playing god’ is no problem at all, since there is no evidence that god exists to be offended.
Anybody know how many guys named Igor work in Venter’s lab?
Here is the paper. It is eerily straightforward.
From the NPR article:
[1] They would probably succumb almost immediately if they escaped the comfort and security of the very closely monitored and delicately adjusted environment that they enjoy in the lab.
[2] So?
I think the moral elephant in the room is that there are too many people who will spit and sputter and call down heaven on my head for the flippancy and cruelty of that second note above but cannot give me any ethically acceptable reason for having nothing else to offer except being “deeply offended” or that an Invisible Supernatural Spook (ISS) gets a hair across its ass whenever I don’t automatically cut infinite slack to its ability to punish and reward.
That said, I welcome our cobbled up tinker toy overlords. Wicked cool.
Dude, haven’t you seen the Montauk monster?!?!
/sarcasm
At first sight my post @ 24;
and my post @ 26;
May seem to be self-contradictory. What I meant to say was that I doubt that this research will cause massive harm by accident. If, however, at some ill-defined point in the future, some effort is made to militarize the technology, then badness may well ensue. Fission was intended to be a plentiful source of cheap energy. Unfortunately, someone worked out that it could also make a rather powerful bomb… and the rest is history.
Argumentum ad populous?
stompsfrogs @ 30
I have a sneaking feeling I am going to regret this but… what is the Montauk monster?
Not yet the engineering of artificial life, as PZ makes clear, because he’s used the protoplasm, cell membrane and other structures from an already-living cell – but a huge technical feat, as already said; and does seem to imply making bacteria almost to order within a decade or so. I admit to some trepidation along with the “Wow – cool!” reaction – it’s vital that such work is carried out safely, and as openly as possible.
@33
http://stupidcelebrities.net/wp-content/mm1.jpg
A dead raccoon that washed up in Montauk. It was funny looking without any hair, and its face was half-decomposed so people here freaked out because they thought it was a genetically engineered creature from Plum Island Animal Disease Center in nearby Long Island. It has its own webpage and Wikipedia entry and everything. Google it, it’s pretty hilarious. My mom totally believes all that crap.
Time to engineer us some vacuumorphs!
That’s so cool.
But what is this shit (from the NPR article)?
One is a fear created by Hollywood’s apparent “Science is bad.” stance (The upcoming Splice looks like it will fully support that idea). The other is pure theistardery.
Read about this on New Scientist. Damn sweet!
Doc Craig, kan i haz crocoduck soon, pleez?
Damn, Gregory Greenwood beat me to it.
NY Times quotes other scientists as saying this is NOT groundbreaking, calling it just a technical tour de force:
“He has not created life, only mimicked it,” Dr. Baltimore said.”
“Dr. Venter’s approach “is not necessarily on the path” to produce useful microorganisms, said George Church, ..”
Oh sure, he didn’t synthesize all the molecules from scratch and assemble them into a cell–so let’s just piss on Venter’s historic accomplishment.
It’s hardly hype to say in Joe Biden’s terms, this is a f’in big deal! It opens the door to making life forms that have never existed before. Not tomorrow, but eventually.
This is silly. How does a making a synthetic life form indicate that we are playing an invisible, undetectable sky fairy who has been absent for millennia?
……..Ok, tell me why again, creationism and ID are bothered with at all in light of developments like this?
I don’t get it…
Grey Goo! Grey Goo!
Poor Prince Chuckboy is gonna have a paroxysm.
Very cool. I heard about the work Venter was doing and I am glad to see it has worked out for them. Maybe I should move away from proteomics and throw myself into synthetic biology. There must be some sort of place for a computer scientist in that field.
Not scientifically interesting — but it sounds very interesting as an engineering problem.
If, as the accommodations are wont to say, belief in god is such a good and noble thing, and it’s such a darned pity that the reality is that there is no god, that we should regret the fact that this wonderful comforting idea of god turned out to be false, and positively be weeping and gnashing our teeth in frustration at the sheer tragedy that is our godless, undirected cosmos. . . .
Then, it would appear that our moral obligation is clear. No, imperative!
We must create a god. Either build some great AI that act as god, or become godlike ourselves, our build a vast enlightened society that functions as a god, or whatever. But however it is done, it should be done. It is the right thing to do, since a universe with a god is so much nicer than the current one without.
Playing god is humanity’s destiny, no, ethical duty! Onwards into the breach, my brethren! Onwards!
I think this is interesting from a biological view point because it would appear to exclude the necessity of some kind of hard to achieve in vitro epigenetic modification in order to make a functional genomic DNA molecule. It is striking that a simple deletion in a replication protein would be the technical roadblock to achieving this even sooner.
For example, it could have been that some kind of unusual covalent modification or DNA or non B-DNA conformation was required somewhere in the genome to get a “bootable” genomic DNA–something that may have been missing or rare in chemically synthesized DNA, or something not generated during passage in yeast cells.
Cue the Disco’tute’s next legal strategy. They are going to claim, in open court, that their “designer” is not a deity, but a time-traveling Craig Venter.
And the defence will call Craig Venter to the stand to take them apart. . . .
Interestingly, of course, this means that developing an actual working biological theory of intelligent design would become scientifically legitimate now or in the near future.
The term ID is so tainted, though, that I suppose we’ll have to come up with some other name for it.
Gregory Greenwood | May 20, 2010 2:39 PM:
A raccoon.
If you can’t sleep for 3 weeks after reading that link, it’s your own damn fault.
Is this checkmate for the ´God hypothesis´? Not likely. Over at the Guardian comments section, the religionists are already retreating back to “who made the chemicals?”.
Cue….With shaky semi-hysterical, red faced and puffing, bottom lip a pouting and a quivering and rheumy eyes a watering…Benny baby in full regalia on his balcony pretending to be Juliet trying to retain some dignity… not very successfully… gasping dire threats of sky fairy class about to descend…get them boats a floatin’ and check ‘wholly babble’ for build instructions and leave out the atheist pair along with the crocoduck one, we is gonna float ta paradise, tis the end times thems pesky baptist nutters were a right on with dat ding….oh! sweet bhabi jeebus save me skinny bum from de tumult!
This is going to get interesting…popcorn in microwave and cold beer in hand…feet up and fag alight…we is ready!
Let the screeching of the religiotards beginneth!
Is this the coveted “Second Genesis” (please don’t kill me for using that metaphor) that I’ve heard various documentaries claim that Venter was working on? If so, then i’m giddy.
Of course the fundies including the RCC will be all over it.
Not a prestigious week for religiotardum methinks!
What with one thing after another!
Anybody know how many guys named Igor work in Venter’s lab?
Just one, part-time. He only comes in on Hump Day.
I’m buying shares in torch and pitchfork suppliers.
While this story is very cool, it’s slightly marred for me by the fact that whenever I see “Craig Venter” I invariably think “Peter Venkman”.
I just don’t get why the news bring ethics into this… It’s a technical improvement, that’s all! It’s not as if they created zombies.
…yet
The creotards saw this coming as they retreat ever further into their gaps. Many years ago, the creationists decried that no other planets around other stars would ever be found as planet formation was impossible. You don’t hear about that much any more (of course).
This is the same thing. Older articles on this topic claim that life will NEVER be replicated in the lab because it is too complex and the province of god. A couple years ago this began to change as they hedged their bets seeing that the inevitable seemed to be drawing near. No doubt they will claim that they saw these accomplishements coming and (as others have stated) that this confirms their belief that you need intelligence to create life. Keep shifting those goalposts!
They have also started hedging in extraterrestrial life, now its “god just may have created life there, too. So what?” Amazing.
“Just one, part-time. He only comes in on Hump Day”
Ouch! It will take a while to recover from that one.
Because the media has to find something to bitch about.
No, no, no — the next step is beetles. Lots and lots of beetles.
There is some truth to this, but I think it overlooks how much this “engineering” can enable basic scientific research. If one can synthesize currently existing genomes and get them to “boot up”, then one can begin to manipulate those genomes in a programmatic way — instead of trying to insert physical molecules into other physical molecules, one can just synthesize the genome with whatever changes are desired. This is a Big Deal.
But I’m not sure that is so important in terms of what has been done. After all, the replicated cells aren’t using the already-living cell material — they are using what the genome specified them to produce. Venter isn’t aiming at abiogenesis, and so using a cell to get started seems irrelevant to me. This is indeed artificial life, just with an initial “scaffolding” of an existing cell.
If the issue is how life arose, and how to produce it “from scratch”, then no, this doesn’t do that. But if the suggestion is that, in addition to generating a synthetic genome, Venter also has to generate synthetic protoplasm, cell membranes, etc., and not use pre-existing organisms to do so, well, that seems silly to me. The final product of Venter’s methodology is indeed “synthetic” by any reasonable standard.
Venter is using pre-existing cells to boot up his synthetic genomes. After that, anything produced is from the synthetic genome.
We’ve had in vitro coupled transcription translation systems for decades. Using living cells rather than in vitro synthetic systems to boot up the genomes is a convenience, not a necessity.
And creating life is just organic chemistry.
Playing god
Well someones gotta to do it!
B
To all those bitching about how Venter hasn’t created life from scratch because he uses an existing cell to kick-start things, may I remind you of Dr. Sagan’s excellent observation?
Cheers,
b&
—
EAC Memographer
BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy
“All but God can prove this sentence true.”
Amazing. I must admit I did not see this coming – I thought artificial organisms where at least a decade into the future. OK, technically this is more of a hybrid than a pure artificial construct but it nonetheless puts us on the fast track to microbial engineering.
Taking that step has endless potential – just think what you could do with human-compatible artificial white blood cells for example! Heck, this could beat nanotech to being the greatest thing in medicine since penicillin.
Well worth watching these videos…
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/church_venter09/church_venter09_index.html
A SHORT COURSE ON SYNTHETIC GENOMICS [7.30.09]
The Edge Master Class 2009
George Church & J. Craig Venter
Awesome. Next stop: crocoduck!
I prefer to have a salary, with benefits. You can count on my applying to these folks after I get my ticket punched.
I’m as concerned about anyone playing God as I am about anyone playing the lead roles in “Harvey” or “Waiting for Godot.”
Doh! I meant title roles, not lead roles.
*sigh*
Anecdotes are not evidence
They are, actually, as are some of your other items. It’s worth noting that Raymond Wolfinger coined the phrase “the plural of anecdote is data”, which has since been turned on its head by unreflective people.
The announcement came just too late for me. I was knocked up by a couple of JW’s this morning and threw the Neanderthal genome sequence at them, but this would have been better.
Seems to me this is more of a technological/engineering acheivement concerning nucleic acid manipulation than a scientific advance deepening our understanding of living phenomena. Knowledge is not the same as power, but the two are unfortunately conflated by entrepreneurs like Venter. Those of you cheerleading his advance should keep in mind that “playing God” is less about religious blasphemy than an acknowledgement that our ability to manipulate and interfere with natural phenomena far exceeds our understanding of them. We do not know the full extent of how Venter’s for profit business venture will effect the community of life on earth. It’s an amazing advance, but I can’t say I’m not frightened by the direction the technology may be taken. This is biotech business, not disinterested scientific inquiry. -Matthew Segall
Intelligent Design has finally been realised. I used to ask who the designer was and how the designer acted in nature, now I know the designer is Craig Venter and he’s done it in a lab. ID is now a valid science!
@ redliterocket4
Engineering and science support one another, my friend. Science makes the discovery and engineering forges these discoveries into tools for making even more discoveries.
It is of little matter if Venter is motivated by greed and pride or nobler sentiments, this accomplishment can stand on its own feet. The issues you mention are legal and societal problems, not scientific. Surely you’re not opposed to electronics because TechCorps make money off of it and that it could theoretically make Terminator reality?
Sure. I was terrified by the invention of fire. And still have nightmares every night about the development of the wheel. In those dreams, large brightly colored metal monsters with names like “Ford” and “Toyota” race across the earth, dragged along by invisible animals.
stompfrogs @ 35 and llewelly @ 51;
Thanks guys… I think. Yet another example that people will believe anything so long as it has a prefix like genetic engineering. It is the same as the Victorian attitude to electricity and Frankenstein’s monster-esque scares, or the popular belief in the 50s that radiation could create giant, mutated monsters.
Genetic engineering is just Hollywood’s latest victim, its preferred ‘Bogeyman science’ of the day, though I know that Prince Charles (among others) is lobbying hard for more irrational fear pertaining to nano-scale technologies.
I wonder why he fixates on nanotechnology? It would be more understandable if he was terrified of radiological effects, since he thought that radiation-induced mutation had resulted in his huge, mishapen ears…
redliterocket4 @ 74;
With respect, I think you have misinterpreted the common usage of the phrase ‘playing god’. While it is sometimes used in the fashion you say, it is also very often used with a theological bent; the idea that some things are the purview of god and science should ‘just not go there’.
It is also commonly used to suggest that a field of endeavour should never be explored. Not simply that our knowledge of the possible consequences is too limited to risk taking such action now, but that the whole area of research is not appropriate for study, based upon the mysticism of the idea that “there are some things mankind was never meant to know…” (said, of course, in a ridiculously pompus, superior tone, preferably with a cinematic thunderstorm in the background.)
Avoiding unnecessary risk is only prudent when dealing with such a potentially powerful technology. Caution is one thing. Curtailing the horizons of science based on ill-informed paranoia and anti-intellectualism is another, and it is the latter that is usually being championed by those who caution against “playing god”.
Oh, and on another note: have you guys noticed how patronizing many anti-progress people are towards nature? They act is if nature is at the total mercy of the whims of humanity and as if everything we create must somehow be superior.
It’s not just genetics and the human-made-viruses-will-kill-all-life-on-earth nonsense, it’s genetically engineered crops too: people honestly think that we create superlife by engineering crops to be more beneficial to us by being larger and more pest-resistant but this is rarely the case. Sure, if the crops optimized to grow in a specific biosphere than it will probably grow there to the expense of everything else. And that means we should keep a close eye on said greenies. But the chance they would spread across the earth and conquer everything in their path? Give me a break! They are less apt to grow in areas outside of their optimized zone due to the sheer amount of optimization, which will cost them energy, rater than more apt. Not even mentioning crops which have had their ability to recreate highly damaged – such as seedless fruits. They are, from every evolutionary standpoint, inert.
An even worse fate would face man-made microbs on the lam. They would succumb to just about everything because they haven’t been designed to be compatible but to perform a specific task.
Mother nature isn’t a damsel in distress fainting at the very sight of the first troll. She’s more likely than not to club said troll with its own club, eat its liver raw and parade the country-side with its head on a stick just because she can.
I’m all for green politics and sustainable development. But some of my supposed peers seem to suffer from a severe case of white knight syndrome.
really now? Who would have thought that people wouldn’t be able to see that “playing God” is just a metaphor…
All the hysteria and fearmongering I’ve seen about this (especially on that Facebook page) reminds me of Caveman Science Fiction.
@ #18 Gordon Shumway
hahhaAha dune ftw!
Those of you cheerleading his advance should keep in mind that “playing God” is less about religious blasphemy than an acknowledgement that our ability to manipulate and interfere with natural phenomena far exceeds our understanding of them.
um, frankly Venter couldn’t have done this without HAVING A PERFECT UNDERSTANDING of how the constructed genome would work.
this is the exact opposite of what you are apparently afraid of.
here’s the money quote from PZ :
I’m still surprised so many people here mention the “playing god” argument.
The whole point is, no god is needed, it’s just chemistry, and we have figured it out.
Quite astonishing actually, given how brief homo sapiens has been around in evolutionary terms, Neandertals died out 30000 years ago, and here we are building DNA strands !
I was listening to a bioethics prof on the radio this morning.
The interviewer said that some people had accused Venter of “Playing God”.
And the prof replied, “Yeah, pretty much.” (and there was an implied “How cool is that!”).
He then went on to detail the huge benefits of this work, while conceding that there were minor ethical issues.
The interviewer summed it up by suggesting that scientists could kill us all.
CAPS LOCK is not evidence either ;) .