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If I were a biology/biochem/genetics/etc type of student today this is exactly what I would love to work on. Perhaps someday we will actually understand how lif
by coldcode 10y ago
If I were a biology/biochem/genetics/etc type of student today this is exactly what I would love to work on. Perhaps someday we will actually understand how life works. That's both exciting and incredibly scary.
- XorNot 10y agoIt does involve loving a lot of really mundane and slow work though. Bioscience is a lot more fun to read about then do, because our tools still really really suck (but grad students are plentiful).
- pluma 10y agoI don't know. The definition of "life" seems so arbitrary and nebulous. It seems really more like we're trying to attribute properties based on a wishful interpretation of emergent behaviour that ultimately boils down to extremely convoluted chemical reactions. Trying to produce genuinely novel and distinct biological lifeforms sounds cool enough on its own though.
- sevenless 10y agoYes, the boundary between life and non-life is not sharp, but to claim it follows that life is hard to define would be the continuum fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy) Manufacturing a living cell from purely chemical ingredients is a concrete enough goal. And almost certainly it lies far, far off in the future.