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For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

quantamagazine.org

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Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#41

Post by mattlondon »

bensyverson wrote: post #2

> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…

> That is the holy grail?

At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.

We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.

That is absolutely fucking wild.

Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?

What a time to be alive.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#43

Post by willguest »

tom-villani wrote: post #38
soraki_soladead wrote: post #4

This is awesome! Can someone in this field comment on the implications of sidestepping the cytoskeleton?

Yes, this is definitely awesome. In eukaryotic cells (your cells) the cytoskeleton is needed to shape the cell, position DNA, and most importantly for this study, separate daughter cells allowing replication. Think of the complexity here, you need to make compartments to separate the copies of the genetic material, physically separated during division. Microtubules assemble the "mitotic spindle" and then pulls the si…

The complexity is certainly awesome, however there are all kinds of "free lunches" that we can take advantage of here, I'm paraphrasing (and glazing) Mike Levin here - when you work with biological systems, you are handling an agential material that naturally expresses itself.

I suspect that, once scientists lean more into the right kind of communication with these systems that many substantial leaps forward will be made. I am very excited about it too, mostly because I think it has the potential to positively impact how we see ourselves (humans) in the natural world.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#45

Post by AndrewKemendo »

mattlondon wrote: post #41
bensyverson wrote: post #2

> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…

> That is the holy grail? At one end we're creating artificial life , the other we are creating artificial intelligence . We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch. That is absolutely fucking wild. Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as…

That’s because we’re almost to the Technological Singularity

Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#47

Post by dbingham »

arjie wrote: post #9
bensyverson wrote: post #2

> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…

Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality. “Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?” Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims…

I think the issue is that those stories are rooted very much in the failures of human systems that we see every day. They are us imagining what could go wrong based on what has gone wrong and is going wrong.

It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.

We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.

Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.

Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.

It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.

It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#48

Post by kilobaud »

mattlondon wrote: post #41
bensyverson wrote: post #2

> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can ima…

> That is the holy grail? At one end we're creating artificial life , the other we are creating artificial intelligence . We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch. That is absolutely fucking wild. Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as…

(Disclaimer: on religion I try to be respectful, as an agnostic atheist) I do think our ability to “build tools that create life” is incredible, but to me has a limited argumentative impact on what I guess you could call the “prime mover” question: _But how did everything start?_ Does that seem reasonable or am I downplaying the implications you mentioned?
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