Re: Commentary: Teaching Life's Origins


r norman wrote:
> On 26 Aug 2005 02:27:48 -0700, "Phibius" <dixon.edward@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >
> >About the difficulty of creating life in the laboratory: I'ld be
> >willing to place a small bet that some lab somewhere will manage to
> >assemble a simple single-celled organism "from scratch" within two
> >decades. After that, figuring out how such an event could occur in
> >nature will be just a matter of time. The repercussions of this will
> >probably be similar to those that followed the publication of Darwin's
> >great work.
>
> You are pretty sure to lose, unless you really stretch the meaning of
> "life" and of "from scratch". There certainly will be the
> construction of a "new organism" created by patching together snippets
> of genetic code from existing ones and synthesizing a few critical new
> pieces from scratch (but using our knowledge of existing genomes to
> design even those pieces). But I don't think that counts as truly
> "from scratch". There certainly will be the do novo synthesis of
> rather complex (bio)molecules with important properties "from scratch"
> but even though they may show some aspects of "living" biomolecules
> they themselves will not be fully live organisms capable of
> metabolism, reproduction, and adaptive responsiveness to the
> environment, all usually important aspects of what we call "life".
>
> I don't have any doubts whatsoever about the fact of abiogenesis. I
> do have serious doubts about how far our technology and our knowledge
> will advance in just twenty years. Are we so enormously far ahead of
> where we were in 1985?

I disagree. It will be done in less than twenty years, and will prove
to have been a rather simple task. Think pressure.

fredlb

.

Relevant Pages

  • Making Life From Scratch, If the Creator Can Do It, It Must Be Easy
    ... Humans have been toying with the idea of making life from scratch. ... But synthesizing the DNA would not be enough: ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: At Long Last
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  • Re: At Long Last
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    (rec.pets.cats.anecdotes)
  • Re: Any old cures for
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    (soc.culture.irish)