Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years
Pastor Dale Morgan
Aug 19, 8:40 PM EDT
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Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years*
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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")