ASsman
02-05-2005, 04:30 PM
And you thought only God had the balls.
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Los Alamos scientist Steen Rasmussen plans to one-up nature by cobbling together a brand-new creature that reproduces and evolves. Is he making a biotech marvel that will do our bidding, or a test-tube-size Frankenstein monster?
By Michael Stroh | February 2005
ne morning last fall, a dozen or so government scientists shuffle into a small conference room on the sprawling grounds of Los Alamos National Laboratory to kick off an unusual research project. The room, tucked away in the basement of an old physics building known as SM-40, has paint-flaked cinderblock walls and a tangle of exposed plumbing overhead. The only decorative touch, a cheap potted floor plant, is slumped half-dead in the corner. Eventually a tall man with a sculpted Scandinavian jawline hurries in. Steen Rasmussen apologizes for running late. He shakes a few hands and then cues the team’s lead chemist, Liaohai Chen, to begin. Someone flips off the lights, and a PowerPoint slide flashes onto a projector screen.
The slide reads: “We are not crazy.”
For an instant the scientists seem unsure how to react. Some laugh, others look uneasy. And who could blame them? Los Alamos, famed birthplace of the atomic bomb, has just awarded Rasmussen nearly $5 million to attempt an experiment as bold as the one that drew scientists to this pine-dotted New Mexico mesa back in the 1940s: He intends to create a brand-new life-form. If any scientific enterprise demands a sanity check at the outset, surely this is it.
Flipping though slides thick with chemical equations, Chen explains how Rasmussen’s team of chemists and physicists, who are gathered together here for the first time, will build their bug. They aren’t going to simply transform an existing organism by tweaking its DNA. No, Chen explains, they’re going to create their being from scratch, literally breathing life into a beaker full of inanimate molecules. It is a Frankensteinian vision—though, granted, one that will unfold on the nano scale. The team’s “protocell” will be thousands of times as small as a typical bacterium and far more primitive. But if all goes as planned, it will possess the defining characteristics of life: It will spawn offspring, generate its own energy, even evolve. Left unspoken was this: If Rasmussen, who first started contemplating protocells seven years ago, and his colleagues succeed, they will have crossed a threshold, bestowing on humankind powers that now belong exclusively to nature (or to God, depending on your beliefs).
The desire to create life is nothing new. In the Renaissance, scientists would put a hunk of raw meat in a jar, set it aside, come back in a few weeks, and observe the “spontaneous generation” of life—maggots and the like. In the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani observed movement when he jolted the severed legs of frogs with electricity; his experiments inspired Mary Shelley in the writing of Frankenstein nearly three decades later. In 1953 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago conducted a landmark investigation: They tossed together molecules thought to have been present in the Earth’s early atmosphere—methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor—and arced a spark of electricity through them to simulate lightning. In a week, amino acids, the building blocks of proteins—and thus life—appeared. It was evidence that haphazard chemical interactions could lead to living things.
... http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicine/article/0,20967,1014147,00.html
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Wait, wait, wait. So if this can be reproduced, wouldn't that throw out all of your "No we were made by God" crap out the window. Atleast the part were God didn't follow the rules of science (which I suppose then, that he created). Because if "life" can be created, then it could have happened on accident. And don't say "how unlikely", buy 100,000 lottery tickets everyday from now to infinity. It will happen eventually.
----
Los Alamos scientist Steen Rasmussen plans to one-up nature by cobbling together a brand-new creature that reproduces and evolves. Is he making a biotech marvel that will do our bidding, or a test-tube-size Frankenstein monster?
By Michael Stroh | February 2005
ne morning last fall, a dozen or so government scientists shuffle into a small conference room on the sprawling grounds of Los Alamos National Laboratory to kick off an unusual research project. The room, tucked away in the basement of an old physics building known as SM-40, has paint-flaked cinderblock walls and a tangle of exposed plumbing overhead. The only decorative touch, a cheap potted floor plant, is slumped half-dead in the corner. Eventually a tall man with a sculpted Scandinavian jawline hurries in. Steen Rasmussen apologizes for running late. He shakes a few hands and then cues the team’s lead chemist, Liaohai Chen, to begin. Someone flips off the lights, and a PowerPoint slide flashes onto a projector screen.
The slide reads: “We are not crazy.”
For an instant the scientists seem unsure how to react. Some laugh, others look uneasy. And who could blame them? Los Alamos, famed birthplace of the atomic bomb, has just awarded Rasmussen nearly $5 million to attempt an experiment as bold as the one that drew scientists to this pine-dotted New Mexico mesa back in the 1940s: He intends to create a brand-new life-form. If any scientific enterprise demands a sanity check at the outset, surely this is it.
Flipping though slides thick with chemical equations, Chen explains how Rasmussen’s team of chemists and physicists, who are gathered together here for the first time, will build their bug. They aren’t going to simply transform an existing organism by tweaking its DNA. No, Chen explains, they’re going to create their being from scratch, literally breathing life into a beaker full of inanimate molecules. It is a Frankensteinian vision—though, granted, one that will unfold on the nano scale. The team’s “protocell” will be thousands of times as small as a typical bacterium and far more primitive. But if all goes as planned, it will possess the defining characteristics of life: It will spawn offspring, generate its own energy, even evolve. Left unspoken was this: If Rasmussen, who first started contemplating protocells seven years ago, and his colleagues succeed, they will have crossed a threshold, bestowing on humankind powers that now belong exclusively to nature (or to God, depending on your beliefs).
The desire to create life is nothing new. In the Renaissance, scientists would put a hunk of raw meat in a jar, set it aside, come back in a few weeks, and observe the “spontaneous generation” of life—maggots and the like. In the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani observed movement when he jolted the severed legs of frogs with electricity; his experiments inspired Mary Shelley in the writing of Frankenstein nearly three decades later. In 1953 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago conducted a landmark investigation: They tossed together molecules thought to have been present in the Earth’s early atmosphere—methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor—and arced a spark of electricity through them to simulate lightning. In a week, amino acids, the building blocks of proteins—and thus life—appeared. It was evidence that haphazard chemical interactions could lead to living things.
... http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicine/article/0,20967,1014147,00.html
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Wait, wait, wait. So if this can be reproduced, wouldn't that throw out all of your "No we were made by God" crap out the window. Atleast the part were God didn't follow the rules of science (which I suppose then, that he created). Because if "life" can be created, then it could have happened on accident. And don't say "how unlikely", buy 100,000 lottery tickets everyday from now to infinity. It will happen eventually.