Scientists Creating New Life? Why Not?

High school kids do it all the time in the back seats of automobiles. It may finally be time for over-educated researchers to start doing something that remarkable, for a change?

...a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

"We've made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide," Szostak said in a phone interview. "What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple [genetic] sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful."

By doing "something useful" for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know. _Wired

Everyone will be wanting to ask, "Yes, but what does it actually do?" Just creating a living cell from spare parts would certainly be a first, but what do these particular scientists plan to do as an encore?

We understand what Craig Venter and his merry band of biochemists, geneticists, and microbiologists are trying to do: they are trying to overturn the entire balance of energy on the human planet of Earth. Venter and his crew plan to create organisms that create fuel--and to become the world's first trillionaires in the process. That is the type of over-riding ambition and hubris that I can respect.

Creating artificial cellular life in the lab will be incredibly useful for bio-science and biotech, of course. Each artificial cell is a powerful bio-model platform, for testing every little function of the cell--and perhaps inventing new ones. It is a profound area of study, in itself. But Venter plans--once again--to do an "end around", bypassing the masses of scientists huddling in the center of the field. He intends to go all the way to the endzone via one Hail Mary pass.

Exciting and most interesting times for the biologically trained.