you lost me, JBArk the monkey... how is creating different from making? I think I know what you'll respond, but i can't admit that differentiation.

Sounds too devout...
JBArk

I guess it's because the making implies a process i.e. making a baby through conception. Whereas creating life implies from scratch.

This is it.

Do you make a story, or do you create a story? They may seem similar, but they are not.

But its not from scratch. nothing is from scratch. just degrees of involvement. the cell they "created" was not created, by your definition. they altered the genetic code of pre-existing DNA and stuck it into a pre-existing cellular shell.

NOT from scratch, as you define it.

JBArk

Then it would not be synthetic, and this discussion is moot.

I'll have to watch the Ted lecture on this to get a better idea of what happened. Everything I've seen has said synthetic, but gene manipulation of this sort is just random mutation on steroids, and the scientists have not "created" life.

LOL! I just started listening to the Ted talk, and in the first minute they describe how they created it from "scratch." In this case from a digital computer model, which they then used as a framework to combine various chemicals in order to form the DNA, from "scratch". They DID NOT take preexisting DNA from an organism and chemically alter it.

"This is the first self replicating organism on the planet whose parent is a computer."

Yeah, that's natural.

I'll listen to the ted talk then. the article I read was quite explicit that the computer was used to redesign and predict the outcome of the genetic changes, and that in a lab the "instructions" spit out by the computer were used to remove and fuse proteins to the dna chain... i am writing this from memory, which is faulty at best.

Ill give ted a ring tomorrow.
JBArk

Preaty much sums it up!

Also, people "make up" stories all the time..

And if you think this synthetic cell was made from scratch literally, then you dont understand what is going on here. It's not from scratch if they started with base compounds..not literally. "scratch" is practically a slang term in this reguard. They are not making something from nothing, so its not literally from scratch.

You can roll your eyes all you want, nature still created it an thats not going to change, eye rolling or not! when they say from "scratch", its obvious they are not taking that as literally as you are..

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/natural

Read the first definition..
"present in or produced by nature"

We are nature, nature created us..therefore what we create is natural according to the above definition.

I pretty much agree with FE.
In my opinion mankind is just where it is supposed to. When you just have a bit interest in spirituality you should know that there is no 'good' or 'bad', it's just one energy. Everything existing on earth (and beyond) is just part of the devine plan, of this universal game. Including war, hate, envy,... Do i understand why? no. Life is just so parodox you have no other choice than just accept it.
It's facinating to see all the tricks modern man has learned, too bad that the primitive knowledge is mostly forgotten nowadays

The standard technique of genetic manipulation in organisms today for the production of transgenics involves pasting a donor DNA sequence into the genome of a recipient organism. The donor DNA is often a gene (from anywhere), and it is aimed to confer altered properties to the recipient organism. If you put it into perspective, this is the first step into making the "synthetic organism"

The synthetic bacterium that's been on the news was different in that instead of the scientists profoundly manipulating the genome of an existing organism, they cut DNA pieces from different organisms and pasted them together into a new genome. The whole task is a few degrees more difficult than what described in the previous paragraph. It is the analogous of adding a moustache to a potato man versus taking 5-6 potato men, disassembling their parts and use them to make a brand new unique potato man.

The idea and the approach is not new and certainly not novel. Its realisation requires lotsa money and time which, Craig Venter the president of the institute who "created" it was willing to pay.

That's more or less what i had read as well. However, Craig Venter asserts on the ted talks that:

starting with the digital code in a computer > building the chromosome from 4 bottles of chemicals > assembling that chromosome in yeast > transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell = a new bacterial species capable of reproducing

Not what had been reported in several written news articles, which leads to some confusion and a lot of questions. "building the chromosome from 4 bottles of chemicals" is an order more involved than cutting and splicing pre-existing DNA pieces.

fascinating, novel and groundbreaking, but still, by my definition, natural (and yes, synthetic, by definition, but to me the term synthetic is a subset of the term natural, and not its antithesis - unnatural).

Just another Hoover dam, but with farther reaching consequences and a whole slew of ethical question marks. But progress nonetheless.

JBArk, l'emerveille

Just curious. Under your definition of the word "natural"...please cite an example of something the is NOT natural. The definition you quoted is referring to not man-made but made in nature, the earth, without the hands of man. You are twisting the definition with your own subtext to fit your personal idea of the term.

well yeah... bingo.

When it comes down to it, the large hadron collider is just as natural as a bee hive. Unless you consider the industrious characteristics of bees and what they manufacture to be seperate from nature. They do work pretty damn hard, which is a concept very alien to me... damn freaky bees!

Ah, typical Craig Venter. No matter how brilliant this guy is, his words should be taken with some caution. Truth is, that he has some good megalomania in him that at times overcomes his passion for science. That means, he not only seeks to produce science but to make "monuments" of science. The synthetic cells his company produces are one typical example of this - this is why he tries to "sell" it as such an exceptional creation.

Another example is the sequencing of the Human Genome; Craig Venter was the one who started it, some scandals were involved (will not go into it now) but again he wanted to make a monument in biological science. At that time he was preaching of the brand new horizons that the newly founded principle of Genomics was showing. However, the Genomics area was quickly overcome since scientists realised that DNA sequence is very inadequate in fully describing biological organisms, and Genomics faded into other principles like Transcriptomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics.

Back to the issue, the original published paper is attached for whoever wants an in-depth description of their methodology. The reality is far different from "building chromosomes from 4 bottles of chemicals" Venter proclamation. This phrase is inherently flawed because for the moment we have no reliable technology to synthesize very long pieces of DNA. Genomes are combinations of 4 nucleotides, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine but they are massive with spans from hundreds of thousands to billion nucleotides long. But we can only synthesize chemically only short spans of nucleotides, like up to 200 nucleotides......

The group synthesized chemically all the artificial genome in many many ,many 80 nucleotides long different stretches of DNA. This is equivalent of not making a whole picture but rather making each individual piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The combination of the jigsaw pieces to form long stretches of DNA were done not "chemically" but "biologically" using enzymes and help from bacteria and yeasts. The whole strategy seems like doing something the "hard way" and unnecessarily so. But again, Craig Venter's idea was that he wanted to be able to claim that they created synthetic life from "scratch", or in other words from pure chemical reactions. In practise, he created the building blocks from scratch, then he used entirely the horsepower of already established biological, molecular biology and enzymatic techniques to do what chemistry alone cannot do; to put everything together in a meaningful way.

Making up a story is called creating it, ya know, with creativity. You can both make and create a story, the making part comes from writing down or speaking what is created in your mind. They are not the same.



How is building a chromosome from four bottles of chemicals not making it from scratch? Please tell me what actually is going on, because you are right, I don't understand. Add a little A here, a little G here, a little T here, and a little C there....ok next line...how about a little G here, a little A there, a little C here, and a little T there. Ok next line...

Why start with clay, straw, and water when you already have a pile of bricks next to you?

If the word natural to you means anything man made AND anything NOT man made.....then there is literally NOTHING that is NOT natural. Which would make the word completely useless other than marketing.

And just one more for good measure.


I'm just trying to be funny.



Thing is Fractal (aside from the "scratch" thing, they are that literal about it), I agree with you. I am essentially playing Devils advocate (though I guess in this case it would be God's advocate?) But in order to flesh out where this would go is to take the topic in a completely different direction. The discussion of what is natural or not, what creation actually is, and the acknowledgement of our power as co-creators becomes a perfect analogy for the concept of Oneness.

Well yeah I guess. That and being judgemental