Nicker on 21/5/2010 at 05:27

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I'm looking forward to the SPORE plug-in.

Mr.Duck on 21/5/2010 at 05:53

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But still mixing up things that already exist (or the new ones they create from the exsisting ones).

V. exciting indeed, but this ain't playing God imho.

Ehm God aside...it truly is interesting to see where they take this further down the road :)

addink on 21/5/2010 at 09:15

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Though I get your point. It is a bit like saying Looking Glass only mixed up the operation codes defined by Intel.

There is the concept of god as the creating forces behind the universe, abstract or not.
And there's the concept of god as the creator of man.

Science is hard at work at further reducing the unknown to abstract concepts, leaving less and less room for the probability of a sentient god that created man to be its play thing.
As soon as artificial life shows signs of intelligence and allows for communication at a higher level, and specimens can be replicated at will in a lab, what will happen to concepts of soul, spirit and afterlife?

What will that do to people who need those concepts to give their life a deeper meaning? Denial? Probably. Nihilism is hard for a lot of people. If anything scientific developments like this won't please the religious.

DDL on 21/5/2010 at 12:58

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Coming at this from an actual GMO laboratory perspective, all the "OMG WHAT IF TEHY EXCAPE AND KILL US ALL!!11" hype is always amusing. I always think the scientists involved should state, and constantly reiterate, exactly how incredibly, incredibly crap these organisms would be at surviving in the wild.

First and foremost, bacterial/yeast strains used in GMO research are hopelessly inbred: they've been kept in sterile laboratory environments for millions of generations, each sucessive generation selecting for a genome that works best in a lab environment. They are good at accepting plasmid DNA via the brutal methods we use to stick it in, without dying (much), they are good at growing fast when fed EXACTLY what they need, and at forming nice little dots on plates. Challenge them in any significant way, and they die.

In addition, almost all of them are deliberately antibiotic sensitive, so you can give them antibiotic resistance (along with your DNA of interest) and use that to select for the ones that actually took up your DNA. Most have severe nutritional defects, so require large quantities of specific amino acids and nucleic acids to survive: they cannot synthesize their own. Again, this is so you can give them back along with interesting DNA and use their newfound ability to make methionine (or whatever) to select the ones who took up the DNA.

And of course, they only hold on to your novel DNA as long as they have to (it's energy intensive): if you relax constraints so they don't NEED to keep making methionine or resisting antibiotics, they'll kick it out, and make themselves crap again.


Long story short: the bacteria and yeast and so on already out in the world are constantly constantly fighting for survival, they are durable, brutal. And are they killing the entire human population on a regular basis? No.
Lab strain escapes? It's getting kerbstomped. It'd be like throwing a miniature poodle into a tank with thresher sharks.

As an example of this (in reverse, kinda): in the lab I work, a year or two back, someone was doing some work on seawater, so they brought some into the lab (without clearing it with everyone first). Seawater is HEAVING with viruses, particularly viruses that attack bacteria (phages). Phages that have to survive in the real world. Hardcore phages.

A week later, there wasn't a viable culture of bacteria anywhere in the entire lab. An entire lab crippled by a millilitre of seawater.

Laboratory strains are rubbish.


Also, in technical terms what he's done here isn't terribly impressive, it's more "time-consuming and mind-fuckingly dull", and there are easier, less timeconsuming ways to do it, but that wouldn't allow him to make these grandiose claims. Kinda like stubbornly building your own stepladder out of thumbtacks even though your next door neighbour has a handy stepladder assembly kit he's willing to lend you, just so you can proudly claim to have created a stepladder "from scratch!!11". Impressive, yes...but a wee bit pointless.

He IS a fantastic self-publicist, though, and he gets the stuff out in the public eye, so fair play to him.

demagogue on 21/5/2010 at 16:59

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I was actually thinking about something along the lines of "Venter-breathed" with life.

........................

That's interesting you've worked in some GMO labs, DDL. My first big legal experience was on GMO regulation. I did a big comparative study of different regulations across a lot of countries and internationally (Biosafety Protocol, WTO, Codex Alimentarius, EU, US, a bunch of developing countries), and regulatory conflicts, mostly in trade. The US law is relatively innovation-friendly, but some countries have publics that are just outright horrified by GMOs and they have regulations to match.

What's interesting about it how critics want to complain... It's pretty obviously (IMO), a cultural/ethical concern with it being "unnatural" (which is fine BTW, IMO; people have a right to value "natural" products, as long as they're just insisting on something like labeling), but there's an interesting psychological phenomenon called "riskification" where they want to translate their concerns in the language of "risk", actually to insist on it (so labeling isn't good enough; our health could be at stake!). But of course risk is something that can be scientifically quantified. But then they come back with the "precaution" argument that the science is still new and the risks are unknown, so we should ban them as a precaution. Though of course if there's no evidence or basis of risk, there isn't even a basis to regulate "unknown risks".

Anyway, one punchline of our project was that it would be much better if GMO regulation were just more transparent about what it really cares about. Most critics, at the end of the day, care that GMOs (and I'm sure synthetic life) are "unnatural" as a cultural/personal-ethical matter, and they should say that transparently and not try to say this is a debate about "scientific but perpetually unknown risks that science can never understand". Then the regulation could take care about what they really care about (e.g., right to knowledge, right to abstain from eating it, etc), and not have play this charade of costly faux-risk-analysis and epic trade disputes over "risks" that, ex hypothesi, don't exist.

Edit/Footnote: There are some risks, of course, but not really "special" risks, but relatively well-known things like spreading antibiotic resistance, transferring pesticide/herb. resistance to weedy relatives for GMO plants, etc... The kinds of risks that can occur for any lab work or introducing any new species into an ecosystem. The "GMO" part doesn't really add a new *kind* of risk, just new aspects to well known kinds of risks, and sensible regulation has long been able to handle these kinds of risks.