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jackFour items for those not watching the news:
Artificial biological life
We somewhat-routinely splice genes between species. In a true living-in-the-future way, one of the most common genes is a "make it glow" gene. [1][2]
Craig Venter, famous for instigating a private attempt to sequence the human genome, now reports having replaced the DNA of a bacterium with something entirely combined from different species, making a creditable claim to have made the first artificial life. Obviously this is a somewhat debatable definition, but is hopefully somewhat of a landmark[3]. Obviously bacteria turning sunlight-into-fuel and vice-versa are nowhere near, but it's good to be at least raising the prestige of the possibility.
Specifically, I don't know how cobbled-together his genome is: how big it is, how many different places it came from, etc. There were lots of news articles, but my molecular biologist friends (and lovers) have yet to helpfully read more about it and then explain it to me in words of five or fewer syllables :)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=craig+venter+artificial+life
Footnotes about living in the future
[1] SO SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR FLYING CARS ALREADY! :)
[2] Charlie Stross reports that police investigating stolen virtual-reality property is now so old news that people have got bored hearing it. While writing about near-future science, technology and politics is a laudable goal, you may simply have to accept that you may find yourself selling books about cutting-edge technology instead. Given the way most media totally fails at correctly depicting technology from up to a decade ago, this is pretty good :)
[3] John Scalzi: "real-life scientists have merely been about to coax a single-celled organism whose genes had been partially human designed into dividing and forming a small colony. [though] it should be noted that my 'merely' notation here is like saying Orville and Wilbur Wright merely flew a couple hundred feet on that first flight of theirs"
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
A BP oil well in the gulf of mexico blew the top off and has been spewing oil ever since. Eventually relief wells will be drilled which will stop the flow, but in the meantime it's the second or third worst spill ever (I think?)
There are all sorts of secondary arguments about it, including about whether BP (or humanity in general) were negligent in the way they drilled. The most bizarre I saw was that, once the US government was involved in the clean-up, apparently Obama's 11-year-old daughter asked him about it. And apparently some people portrayed this as some sort of scandal. I can't even tell WHY: presumably the implication is that either (a) he was stupid for not having magically fixed it, and she pointed this out or (b) she was stupid for not understanding it without asking, despite being, you know, 11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
World Cup
The world cup[1] starts next week. Obviously I support England. I normally support Scotland as second choice, as being closest to England (though I know not all Scottish people would approve), but they're not there, as aren't Ireland (after a referee very controversially didn't see a goal-scoring hand-ball in the qualifying match they lost against France). So, I suppose France have to be my second choice.
The initial seeding seems not too bad for England. They apparently succeeded well enough in the qualifying to be seeded (?) and don't have any other previous winners or finalists in the same first-round group. Obviously that's not an accurate indicator, as my analysis is based on how good these teams were 45 years ago, not now, but it's always embarrassing to be tipped to win the tournament, then seeded into a group with two previous finalists, and get knocked out in the first round.
An optimist might even hope we get to the semi-final before playing anyone who's won the competition more than once, or more than twice. On the other hand, the last time I saw England playing it was last week in a warm-up match in five minutes on a tiny TV in a nice pub at the middle of a hill in Mow Cop, and they were losing to Japan 1-0. Apparently they played abysmally and only won because Japan defenders knocked it back into their own net twice before the end of the game. So, we'll see how it goes.
[1] The football one[2].
[2] The association one.
Israel soldiers kill European civilians
A number of aid ships sent from Turkey and other places sail to Gaza, defying the Israeli blockade. The Israeli blockade refuses to let them through without being inspected and shipped on land by Israeli forces, and eventually boards them. People are killed.
Artificial biological life
We somewhat-routinely splice genes between species. In a true living-in-the-future way, one of the most common genes is a "make it glow" gene. [1][2]
Craig Venter, famous for instigating a private attempt to sequence the human genome, now reports having replaced the DNA of a bacterium with something entirely combined from different species, making a creditable claim to have made the first artificial life. Obviously this is a somewhat debatable definition, but is hopefully somewhat of a landmark[3]. Obviously bacteria turning sunlight-into-fuel and vice-versa are nowhere near, but it's good to be at least raising the prestige of the possibility.
Specifically, I don't know how cobbled-together his genome is: how big it is, how many different places it came from, etc. There were lots of news articles, but my molecular biologist friends (and lovers) have yet to helpfully read more about it and then explain it to me in words of five or fewer syllables :)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=craig+venter+artificial+life
Footnotes about living in the future
[1] SO SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR FLYING CARS ALREADY! :)
[2] Charlie Stross reports that police investigating stolen virtual-reality property is now so old news that people have got bored hearing it. While writing about near-future science, technology and politics is a laudable goal, you may simply have to accept that you may find yourself selling books about cutting-edge technology instead. Given the way most media totally fails at correctly depicting technology from up to a decade ago, this is pretty good :)
[3] John Scalzi: "real-life scientists have merely been about to coax a single-celled organism whose genes had been partially human designed into dividing and forming a small colony. [though] it should be noted that my 'merely' notation here is like saying Orville and Wilbur Wright merely flew a couple hundred feet on that first flight of theirs"
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
A BP oil well in the gulf of mexico blew the top off and has been spewing oil ever since. Eventually relief wells will be drilled which will stop the flow, but in the meantime it's the second or third worst spill ever (I think?)
There are all sorts of secondary arguments about it, including about whether BP (or humanity in general) were negligent in the way they drilled. The most bizarre I saw was that, once the US government was involved in the clean-up, apparently Obama's 11-year-old daughter asked him about it. And apparently some people portrayed this as some sort of scandal. I can't even tell WHY: presumably the implication is that either (a) he was stupid for not having magically fixed it, and she pointed this out or (b) she was stupid for not understanding it without asking, despite being, you know, 11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
World Cup
The world cup[1] starts next week. Obviously I support England. I normally support Scotland as second choice, as being closest to England (though I know not all Scottish people would approve), but they're not there, as aren't Ireland (after a referee very controversially didn't see a goal-scoring hand-ball in the qualifying match they lost against France). So, I suppose France have to be my second choice.
The initial seeding seems not too bad for England. They apparently succeeded well enough in the qualifying to be seeded (?) and don't have any other previous winners or finalists in the same first-round group. Obviously that's not an accurate indicator, as my analysis is based on how good these teams were 45 years ago, not now, but it's always embarrassing to be tipped to win the tournament, then seeded into a group with two previous finalists, and get knocked out in the first round.
An optimist might even hope we get to the semi-final before playing anyone who's won the competition more than once, or more than twice. On the other hand, the last time I saw England playing it was last week in a warm-up match in five minutes on a tiny TV in a nice pub at the middle of a hill in Mow Cop, and they were losing to Japan 1-0. Apparently they played abysmally and only won because Japan defenders knocked it back into their own net twice before the end of the game. So, we'll see how it goes.
[1] The football one[2].
[2] The association one.
Israel soldiers kill European civilians
A number of aid ships sent from Turkey and other places sail to Gaza, defying the Israeli blockade. The Israeli blockade refuses to let them through without being inspected and shipped on land by Israeli forces, and eventually boards them. People are killed.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 12:45 am (UTC)Venter
Date: 2010-06-03 08:06 am (UTC)People synthesized a Polio virus in 2002.
There’s disagreement about whether viruses are “life” but AFAIK in both that case and this, only a nucleus was actually synthesized, not the rest of the organism.
For all I know there are good reasons it’s harder to synthesize a bacterial nucleus than a viral one, but it does seem to me that what’s been done is different in degree (and level of publicity) from what’s gone before rather than in kind.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 09:49 am (UTC)Re: Venter
Date: 2010-06-03 10:05 am (UTC)In the case of a virus, if you synthesize the viral genome you essentially have a virus, because that's the definition of what a virus is. It's a little molecular machine for getting a genome into a host cell which will then express the genome and make new virions (the technical name for the particle which encloses said viral genome). That's no different at all from the process of making a "natural" virus.
In the case of bacterium, well, it's harder because the sheer amount of DNA is several orders of magnitude bigger, for a start. One of the things that Venter has successfully demonstrated is that it's possible to create a million base molecule of DNA using an abiotic system. No absolutely new technologies there, but scaling up from synthesizing a few tens or a few hundred bases was not actually trivial.
The philosophical question is whether synthesizing a bacterial genome and putting it into an empty bacterial host actually "counts". I'm inclined to think that it does, since the genome again contains complete instructions for the empty host cell to generate new bacterial cells from simple components (sugars, amino acids, vitamins etc). But again, this isn't entirely new; it's been possible for a long time to take a genome from one bacterial species and put it into another, and the recipient cell will divide to produce offspring of the species determined by the donor genome, not by the nature of the recipient cell.
Hypothetically, Venter's results mean that it would be possible to design a genome literally from scratch, but in practice we don't yet know enough about genes and proteins to do this. I'm inclined to say that there isn't much in principle difference between introducing a novel genome cobbled together from various different species, and introducing one synthesized abiotically; for the forseeable future, the former is likely to be a lot more practically useful anyway!
Re: Venter
Date: 2010-06-03 10:16 am (UTC)Re: Venter
Date: 2010-06-03 10:21 am (UTC)synthesizing a bacterial genome and putting it into an empty bacterial host actually "counts".
Yeah, I hesitated at first. Obviously the rest of the cell DOES matter, and we shouldn't ignore it because we can't make one from scratch. But on the other hand, putting DNA into an appropriate cell and seeing it if works is what DNA DOES. If you clone something, people don't whine because you used a similar-egg rather than an identical-egg to do so.
Venter's results mean that it would be possible to design a genome literally from scratch, but in practice we don't yet know enough about genes and proteins to do this ... there isn't much in principle difference between introducing a novel genome cobbled together from various different species, and introducing one synthesized abiotically;
Yeah. I think this is what they didn't say. Is the genome he sequenced taken exactly from another bacterium with maybe a few modifications? Or is it combined from several in a way which is closer to writing one from scratch than anyone else has, even if it's still very distant from it?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 10:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 01:09 pm (UTC)This does work as a proof that as regards DNA, it's completely specified by sequence, and you can get away with chucking out any epigenetic factors (in bacteria, anyway)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-03 01:27 pm (UTC)Thank you. Yes, that's roughly what I was thinking, though without the vocabulary to express it. Like, the difference between writing a program for a completely new computer chip, and thinking that it ought to work, and actually RUNNING it and seeing that it DOES work. Except that for a chip, you have a manual that says if there's any weird settings you have to get right, whereas for DNA and cells, you don't have that...