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> "The other reason we don't need to be freaking out, says Romesberg, is that these molecules have not been designed to work at all in complex organisms, and seeing as they're like nothing found in nature, there's little chance that this could get wildly out of hand." This is how the plot of every horror/disaster movie starts.
> This is how the plot of every horror/disaster movie starts. Because its a trope. Can you explain how it gets wildly out of hand beyond speculation?
> "The other reason we don't need to be freaking out, says Romesberg, is that these molecules have not been designed to work at all in complex organisms, and seeing as they're like nothing found in nature, there's little chance that this could get wildly out of hand." This is how the plot of every horror/disaster movie starts.
That's true. I also noticed that whenever I see a helicopter on a screen, the chances of it not crashing or getting shot down are slim. So in order to protect us from getting whiped out by rogue bacteria from a research lab we MUST ban disaster movies NOW!
> "The other reason we don't need to be freaking out, says Romesberg, is that these molecules have not been designed to work at all in complex organisms, and seeing as they're like nothing found in nature, there's little chance that this could get wildly out of hand." This is how the plot of every horror/disaster movie starts.
> "The other reason we don't need to be freaking out, says Romesberg, is that these molecules have not been designed to work at all in complex organisms, and seeing as they're like nothing found in nature, there's little chance that this could get wildly out of hand." This is how the plot of every horror/disaster movie starts.
Definitely interesting work, and some very clever solutions to difficult problems, but to be clear, they only had a single unnatural base pair, and it was only in a plasmid. Addressing the other comments about this leading to some crazy scifi scenario, imagine telling someone you used machine learning to identify spam emails and they started freaking out about how you're going to start Skynet. If you understand how t…
* In order to reproduce (and maintain the new bases in its DNA), does the organism need a source of these nucleotides in its growth medium? (i.e. in its food?) The alternative would be to produce them itself, but that would require scarily advanced genetic engineering, I think.
* If one of these bases is in a gene, what happens during mRNA transcription? Total failure?
Point 1 at least should more-or-less ensure this can't escape the lab.
Star Trek depicted one of the scarier applications of such a technology: There, The Jem'Hadaar are a genetically engineered race of warriors controlled by the Dominion, who exert power over them by being the sole provider of a substance (Ketracel-White) that they need in order to survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(Star_Trek) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ketracel-white If my reading of the paper is…
I'm not at all sure whether or not denser information and thus bigger-step mutations are evolutionary advantageous.
Definitely interesting work, and some very clever solutions to difficult problems, but to be clear, they only had a single unnatural base pair, and it was only in a plasmid. Addressing the other comments about this leading to some crazy scifi scenario, imagine telling someone you used machine learning to identify spam emails and they started freaking out about how you're going to start Skynet. If you understand how t…
Biological systems are relatively unpredictable, and based on rules that we didn't design and cannot begin to claim we fully understand.
Your analogy therefore strongly predicts negative unforeseen consequences.