Monday, December 17, 2007

Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

We've been cut off for a few days, as loyal listeners would have noticed. The windmill that runs our generator was busted by high winds, but we've borrowed a gas powered generator while we repair the damage.

Back on the air tonight, subject: DNA hacking. Could this technology supercede efforts in mind control? An article in the Washington Post touches on the latest developments, but we will explore the implications:


Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms


By Rick WeissWashington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 17, 2007; Page A01


It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.


Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

"This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be," said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies science's effects on society. "Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes."


Washington Post article



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