Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years

[copo]

WASHINGTON - Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it.

"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

• A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.

• A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

• A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.

"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

(This version CORRECTS Bedau quote to "shed new light")

[BloodY_HunteR]

what a nice story... lol but just like that.. where do u found it..?

[Daniel]

Once again scientists are messing with mother nature by trying to make speicies and other things it makes me sick.

[Schoolhacker]

wow... cool... but isnt ythis against the law? i thought the US stoped it...
same for recommbent life... like hybreds of different animals or something like half human half something else and the half human will have that animal's abilities and a human's intelegence... for example... human avian hybrid lol... you can fly and your not so dumb... HAHA

[Juggalette]

[Flavor]

mmm so interesting, I can't wait for science to rape us, in a good way with all sorts of great and advanced cool shit

[Law]

Cloning already exists and is in fact capable to reproduce life in full capacity (mostly),
So we already call that artificial life.

[Flavor]

yes, science science!!!! I want UNLIMITED ENERGY , NAO!

[Rad]

here come the zombies we all see in the movies

[Basi]

define AI, some would say that it already exists and has existed for quite some time.

"Some people deny that artificial intelligence exists. They say that any apparent examples of machines acting intelligently are just illusions. This makes me wonder if we replace a human with a machine, does that mean that the human we replaced wasn't doing anything intelligent? I don't see how we can avoid that conclusion.

As machines perform more and more tasks formally done by humans, does this mean that less and less human activity will have turned out to require intelligence? At the rate we're going I think we'll soon discover that humans were never intelligent in the first place."

countless examples exist already