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This really is pretty amazing work. But, to the uninitiated, there's a dark side; I overheard someone commenting about an earlier post about this experiment, th
by gardenfelder 4y ago
This really is pretty amazing work. But, to the uninitiated, there's a dark side; I overheard someone commenting about an earlier post about this experiment, thinking it's possible to get out a chemistry set and just make a living thing. To be clear, they started with stem cells, and teased them into doing the right thing - they did not create a new living artifact from scratch;
> Instead, they used stem cells - the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type - and then mimicked natural processes in the lab.
- xwdv 4y agoWouldn’t the living artifact that results from this embryo just be horribly incompatible with life and die quickly or at best live for a brief time before expiring?
- saxonww 4y agoPossibly? I expect we'll figure out how to do this with a high chance of success within the next few decades if not sooner, unless for some reason every country capable of supporting the research bans it.
- tsimionescu 4y agoHuman cloning research has similarly been banned, and quite successfully, hasn't it?
- Firmwarrior 4y agoWhat's the point in cloning people? I'm pretty clueless about biology, but as I understand it the process to generate new semi-randomized humans using a woman is fairly well understood and straightforward
- implements 4y ago> What's the point in cloning people? Medical treatment (availability of 100% immune-compatible spare parts) and in a possible future, life extension.
- Tozen 4y agoI suspect we will find out at some point in the next 25 to 50 years. Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. As in not stop at just the embryo stage, but make fully functional living beings, regardless of whatever laws exist. The ramifications of "synthetic life", will sure to be staggering. This was covered a bit in the Blade Runner Sci-Fi, but what real Replicants would be like and what they will do with them, might be wilder than we could imagine.
- tsimionescu 4y ago> Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. People always say this, and yet the universal ban on human cloning has, at least so far, held strong and prevented further research more or less entirely.
- nomel 4y agoPrimates have been cloned [1], human embryos have been cloned (supposedly) [2], and there are confirmed gene edited babies [3]. But, I doubt the existence of a ban means humans haven't been cloned, because I have trouble believing that a group that would successfully clone a human would be dumb enough to tell the world, state sponsored or not. 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/these-monkey-twins-are-first-primate-clones-made-method-developed-dolly https://www.science.org/content/article/these-monkey-twins-a... 2. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-02/04/content_7443166.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-02/04/content_7443166... 3. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/08/cloning-crispr-he-jiankui-china-biotech-boom-could-transform-lives-destroy-them/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/08/cloning-crispr-he-jiank...
- tsimionescu 4y agoPrimates are not humans, cloning embryos for stem cell research is different from creating human clones, and the scientist who produced the two CRISPR-edited children went to jail, and he and his associates are banned for life from working in this type of research or even providing care in this area.
- fsckboy 4y ago> to the uninitiated, there's a dark side to the initiated I wish there was a dark side! > they did not create a new living artifact from scratch that is where this is headed, that is where they want to go, that is not what they've done... till they do it. That is the dark side. Humans in a competition with one another are not capable in a broad sense of reining in every worst impulse, as we saw with recent "gain of function" experiments.
- parineum 4y agoWhy is that the dark side?
- b112 4y agoNot sure why the parent thinks so, but my only concern is with new lifeforms. We constantly mess up the ecosystem, merely by introducing existing species into environments which cannot handle them. Soon we will be able to engineer exotic forms of life, yet we cannot currently control, reign in, or manage current, naturly evolved forms of life. For example, we have to spray deadly chemicals on crops, to kill fungus, bacteria, etc. Of we have a pest problem, we have to entice them to eat poison, or trick them into traps. Our control of existing orgamisims is essentially non-existent. The above methods just reduce population, often very ineffectively. This means that almost certainly, when things we create end up free, we will be incapable of removing them from the ecosystem. We could literally destroy the biosphere more readily than nukes, or global warming ever could. And things will get free.
- hidroto 4y agoaside from bad actors, i think that safe guards could prove effective. synthetic organisms would have no natural predators, but the would also have no natural defenses. we could make them without an immune system or make it depend on a molecule that does not exist in the wild. so they would quickly die out.
- b112 4y ago
- dang 4y agoOk, we've put stem cells up there too. Thanks!
- Tozen 4y agoNow the title is arguably confusing and significantly different from that of the original linked article. It seems unnecessary to mangle the title to that extent, to create a wider difference.
- dang 4y agoIt's standard for users to clamor for changes to misleading titles, and standard for moderators to accede to the clamoring. We do that because otherwise the thread fills up with ever more complaints about the title. The OP is a press release and such titles are usually overstated and need to be changed anyhow. This is in the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). This one seems designed to aggrandize the study (as well a press release should, I suppose), so the complaining commenters had a point or two.
- Tozen 4y agoUnderstand, as the various situations are complex. Thanks for the explanation.
- user_7832 4y agoWell, to quote Carl Sagan, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. I doubt human technology will be able to create life from organic molecules for at least several decades if not centuries.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LinuxBender 4y agoHere is a auto-tuned song of Carl Sagan [1] saying that quote so that others may have it stuck in their heads and to share the full quote. [1] - https://amorningfilledwith400billionsuns.ytmnd.com/ https://amorningfilledwith400billionsuns.ytmnd.com/
- ikt 4y agoThanks for taking me back to 2009* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc)
- intrasight 4y agoWhat a great quote!
- ralusek 4y agoAnd to think he was just trying to convince a kernel developer that it would be fine to use JS, just this one time, for a simple UI he needed.
- guggleet 4y agoWe already can...? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI think syntactic biology is still very far from creating lifeforms from atomic or molecular precursors. Xenobots, for example are made using harvested stem cells