Spiegelman's Monster

Let's make DNAduino and start doing this kind of thing at home. Best science project.

I wonder what the current state of the art of homemade bioexperimentation is.

The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion.

We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary for the life we see on Earth (caveat: Miller and Urey may have been wrong about early Earth conditions).

Spiegelman tried to create something closer to what we'd consider living. His "monster" was bootstrapped with an enzyme and some RNA (a simpler version of DNA). The enzyme replicated the RNA many times over. After a "generation" of replication, he'd move a sample of the RNA over to a new test tube. This would be the father of a new generation. And so on, he repeated this process almost 100 times.

The interesting thing is that this extremely simple "monster" ended up evolving in a way. By the end of a few generations, the RNA had adapted to its environment and become much more efficient at replication. Other attempts at the experiment have produced similar results. In effect, Spiegelman created a barebones pseudo-living machine, and demonstrated it undergoing evolution in the process.

The monster itself is just a strand of RNA.

The definition of living by most biologists wouldn't include a strand of genetic material. Fire replicates in particular environments, as do viruses. But we don't typically classify either as living.

I think the point you're getting at is that the distinction between living and non-living is a bit arbitrary and meaningless. I agree.

Agree that the Wikipedia page doesn't do it justice. Richard Dawkins does an excellent job discussing the "monster" and providing context regarding theories on the origin of life in his book, The Ancestor's Tale. The "monster" comes near the end of the book since it's a backward march through time. It's a 700 page book, but so worth the read.

http://www.amazon.com/Ancestors-Tale-Pilgrimage-Dawn-Evoluti...

For those who are interested in this space, I'd strongly recommend first looking at options outside of your home.

If you're in the bay area, here's a hacker/maker space for biology:

http://biocurious.org/

If you're not, you could investigate joining an iGEM team. It's an annual synthetic biology competition, where competitors engineer biological "machines" and are encouraged to factor their work into standard, reusable biological components, called BioBricks (see: http://parts.igem.org/Catalog). I participated for some time in college, and it was really exciting and I was able to contribute via mathematical/in silica modeling with only a handful of undergraduate biology courses under my belt.

If you're set on your own biohacking space, you're going to need to get some equipment. A non-exhaustive list of what you'll likely need in no particular order, are: reaction vessels, pipettes + tips, plates + medium, incubators, autoclave, fridge/freezer, restriction enzymes & ligase, electrophoresis chamber + gel, PCR machine + polymerase, centrifuge, microscope, and of course, some e. coli.

Please do your research and if you don't have lab experience or are uncertain about something, find someone who has worked in a lab to help you. Most of this stuff isn't as scary as it seems, but if you mishandle the equipment&chemicals, you can do real damage, to yourself, to property, and to the environment. It's not something you should "move fast and break things" with.