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2007-08-20 07:52:09
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science WriterMon Aug 20, 1:49 AM ET
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."