Saturday, April 6, 2013

Artificial life

Biochemist Fazale Rana thinks that soon we will see the actual creation of artificial life.  Speaking from his viewpoint as a Christian, and in contrast to some opinions, he is just fine with this.

But exactly what is this new development going to be?  Creating Life in the Lab explains in a lot of chemical detail what scientists are working on.

Craig Venter's organization has set a goal to "engineer a synthetic bacterium" they will call "mycoplasma laboratorium."  So far they have "identified the minimum genetic requirements for life, synthesized the genomes of two simple microbes from basic chemical constituents, and figured out how to insert a synthetic genome into a bacterial cell."

"They have been able to combine all these steps to create a synthetic version of a bacterium.  All that's left is to use their methodology to make a novel, artificial genome and implant it into a bacterial cell, and the research team will have created the first artificial organism."

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