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All our genetic engineering tweaks existing organisms. We cannot make life in the lab.
by yters 9y ago
All our genetic engineering tweaks existing organisms. We cannot make life in the lab.
- ben_w 9y agoExcept for the lab-built bacterial chromosomes (1), the lab-built entire viral units (2), and the lab-built xenobases (3). (1) http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/minimal-cell/overview/ http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/minimal-cell/overv... (2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_virology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_virology (3) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno_nucleic_acid Edit: just to add, I wouldn’t accept “we have not done it from scratch yet” as a valid argument that we cannot do better than natural selection, any more than I would accept ”$person has not yet fabricated a CPU” as an argument that $person can’t code better than at least one professional CPU designer.
- yters 9y agoCPUs weren't evolved.
- ben_w 9y agoIrrelevant. I thought that would’ve been clear from me using the comparison as an example of a bad argument. Also, not even correct, assuming I have been correctly informed that simulated evolution is used for some optimisations of e.g. precise physical transistor placement.