Scientists will Create Artificial Life from Synthetic DNA

Scientists around the world are trying to create life from scratch. Several scientists expect a basic artificial life will be announced within 3 to 10 years from today. They believe the first cell of synthetic life will be made from the basic chemicals in DNA. Artificial life will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

Mark Bedau, the chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, said:

It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it… We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.

Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe.. This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.

Bedau also said there are legitimate worries about creating life:

When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab… But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen…

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

• A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.
• A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.
• A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.

From: Yahoo News: Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years by SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer