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So can we say science has finally achieved a biological “Hello World”?
by fiftyfifty 6y ago
So can we say science has finally achieved a biological “Hello World”?
- tgv 6y agoMore like a quine, isn't it? Pretty impressive.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoNot exactly. These lines of cells weren't created from scratch. From the article: > Scientists at JCVI constructed the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. They didn’t build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome. They called it JCVI-syn1.0.
- maverick74 6y agoExactly what i was writing!!! :) Now, i guess that - like last time - we're going to have news everywhere claiming that scientists "created life" (again). LOL
- booleandilemma 6y agoThose gaps keep getting smaller and smaller though, don't they?
- thereisnospork 6y agoI'm curious if they are going to 'ship of Theseus' it. First replace the dna, done, then the lipid membrane, then feed it C13 labelled amino acids to prove that the entirety of the cell proteom is from their synthetic genes. Not quite creating life but definitely hijacking it.
- dnautics 6y agoNot specifically with C13, but that is what is going on.
- dnautics 6y ago"Hello World" isn't exactly created from scratch either. You're using libc in most cases.
- tambourine_man 6y agoSomeone wrote it though. It’s not a blackbox that’s evolved independently for millions of years. We as a species know how to build one, since we did.
- blakesley 6y agoI suppose this makes sense, but at a personal level, the two scenarios seem similar. Interpreters & compilers are blackbox to me, at least. I have no idea how they work, and I wouldn't be able to make one for myself. But sure, someone could teach me.
- neolog 6y agoI can build libc all by myself from source
- therein 6y agoOr more closely, give me the .o files for my architecture, I somewhat understand the calling convention used. I should be able to make use of it.
- maverick74 6y agoNo, because like in JCVI-syn1.0 "They didn’t build that cell completely from scratch. Instead, they started with cells from a very simple type of bacteria called a mycoplasma. They destroyed the DNA in those cells and replaced it with DNA that was designed on a computer and synthesized in a lab. This was the first organism in the history of life on Earth to have an entirely synthetic genome." In another words, like in the previous attempt (in which i was equally amazed - at first - only to then became disappointed latter) THEY DID NOT CREATE LIFE!!! They picked up an already living organism and "reprogrammed it". Its like having a computer. They are learning to program, and remove all the unnecessary parts but they still don't have a clue on to build the hardware. The problem, it seems, is in transforming bare lifeless quimicals into something "alive". Creating life, it seems, is still something reserved only to God Himself! (and i suspect it's going to be like that for a loooong time, if we ever manage to accomplish it anyway)
- camjohnson26 6y agoIntelligent Design as a theory for life’s origins has received a lot of unfair criticism because people think it’s code for “young earth creationism”. It’s not though, it’s an observation that random natural processes are too slow at generating information to be responsible for life on earth. It’s the same deductive logic you would use if you found an artifact in the middle of the desert. Yes natural forces could have carved an image from the rock, but the more detailed the image the less likely it arose naturally. The fact that even now, no one has any idea of how to create the basic forms of life shows the astonishing amount of information that exists in even a simple cell. It’s time to reconsider intelligent design, even if the designer is an alien species or a programmer of a simulation. There’s too much information to spontaneously generate, and we have never seen life come from non life. The theory has been essentially banished from academia for political, not scientific, reasons, but Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer’s books, specifically Darwin’s Doubt and Signature of the Cell, lay out the case in detail.
- selimthegrim 6y agoIt’s been banished from non religious parts of academia because it’s not falsifiable or testable, so it belongs in the theology department.
- lupire 6y agoWhat would that mean?
- yread 6y agoMore like proof of concept of a buffer overflow vulnerability. It's smart but we have no idea what do all these transistors do
- swiley 6y agoPerhaps "Hello world copy and pasted from StackOverflow."
- kazinator 6y agoYes ... using a copy and paste of seven existing functions, knowing what two of them do. Oh, and bootstrapped using a copy of an existing execution environment.
- mrguyorama 6y agoSo basically the React tutorial app?
- therein 6y agoOnly if we are shipping the cell with a 120MB node_modules directory.
- svachalek 6y agoIt's a 480 line (gene) Hello World. For this to be the minimum viable cell, when we don't even know what so many of the genes do, would be surprising to me. It would mean pre-cellular life somehow gathered these genes or equivalents without the benefits a cell provides. Not saying it's impossible, but it would be pretty interesting.