May 26, 2010

Synthetic Life or Assembly



Synthetic Life or is it assembly?

I defiantly see it as assembly. What has essentially happened is from a not so good movie (albiet a better real life story) Tucker and his car. when they first built it they used off the shelf car parts with a new body and used the car to help get funding to build a whole new car.

Now this only works as an analogy. What really was really done was that pieces of dna were assembly and then used to replace the dna in an already functional cell. That is where it gets really amazing, the cell worked.

So now we have a brand new kind of life. What really is fascinating is this is just the first step. Soon there will be Wholly new life forms and quite possibly made from different building blocks.

So what could this seemingly Frankenstein concept really do for us to help. One we can use this type of technology to make viruses that cure cancer, as well as a host of other diseases. How about an organism that breaks down CO2 faster better, and can be used to filter coal burning power plants. Instead of changing an organism's existing dna we now may be able to completely build it from the ground up.

For more info see links below.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7751164/We-need-a-real-debate-about-Synthia.html
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/node/631
http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&safe=off&q=craig+venter+synthetic+life&aq=1z&aqi=g-z3g-c1g6&aql=&oq=Craig+Venter&gs_rfai=
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/synthetic_genome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHIocNOHd7A&feature=related

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