Re: Science and Faith (Serious)



>>Not cells, eggs
>>or sperm. We can have those in abundance. Isolate life itself and give
>>me the scientific facts that inhabit it. Indeed - believers believe.
>>In my view those who believe that science can and will exclude the
>>concept of God are no less faith based fundamentalists as their
>>counterparts in religions.
>
> I'm not sure I follow the argument here. Are you saying because we
> can't manufacture life in a laboratory, life requires divine
> intervention?
>
> Have you read this article?
> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2539
> Here's the first two paragraphs: "Scientists have built the virus that
> causes polio from scratch in the lab, using nothing more than genetic
> sequence information from public databases and readily available
> technology.
> The feat proves that even if all the polio virus in the world were
> destroyed, it would be easily possible to resurrect the crippling
> disease, says Aniko Paul at the State University of New York at Stony
> Brook, one of the researchers conducting the study."


"Once they had all the segments, the team pasted the pieces together to
produce one long stretch of DNA. They then used a commercially available
enzyme to convert the DNA into RNA - the genetic form of the polio
virus.

Finally, they added the RNA to a soup made from human cells. This
enabled the RNA to use the cellular machinery to create the proteins
that complete the virus particles. The result was an infectious agent
that could destroy cultured human cells and paralyse or kill mice in
much the same way as the normal polio virus."

A mutation. Kids stuff.


>
> And this:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/dispatch/story/0,12978,1088588,00.html
> "Scientists have built a virus from scratch in just two weeks. The new
> virus was created by human genome sequencing pioneer Craig Venter and
> his team at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in
> Rockville, Maryland.
> It is the second virus to be synthesised from commercially available
> ingredients. The first - a poliovirus completed by Eckard Wimmer and
> his colleagues last year - took three years to make. "If we had to do
> it over, I would use [Venter's] method," says Wimmer, who works at the
> State University of New York at Stony Brook."


"The team used enzymes to glue the oligonucleotides together accurately
into the complete 5,386-base genetic strand, and to copy it many times.
When the synthetic viral genome was injected into bacteria, the
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
bacterial cell's machinery read the instructions and created fully
fledged viruses."

It did no more or less than mutate an existing life form. Gardeners do
it every day.


.

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