"Craig Venter creates synthetic life form" Thread

Guardian.co.uk

I'm going to skip the entire "Ethics" part of this, on account of the vast majority of arguments against it are entirely fallacious.

Do you think this is the beginning of the future? I damn near cried when I saw this. I understand that it's not necessarily "Making life from scratch".

It's proof of concept. What a glorious concept, it is.

Ian wrote: Dr Venter became a controversial figure in the 1990s when he pitted his
former company, Celera Genomics, against the publicly funded effort to
sequence the human genome, the Human Genome Project. Venter had
already applied for patents on more than 300 genes, raising concerns
that the company might claim intellectual rights to the building blocks
of life.

In a slight way reminds me of the 6th day.

Profanity-Incarnate wrote: Guardian.co.uk

I'm going to skip the entire "Ethics" part of this, on account of the vast majority of arguments against it are entirely fallacious.

Do you think this is the beginning of the future? I damn near cried when I saw this. I understand that it's not necessarily "Making life from scratch".

It's proof of concept. What a glorious concept, it is.

The thought of creating synthetic organisms for our purposes, such as those described in the article, has dramatic applications and significant advantages with reproduction and adaptability. Of course, the problem is how capable bacteria are due to how quickly they can replicate and how quickly they can alter their own functions. Controls realistically would deteriorate because those controls would necessarily be genetic due to needing to reproduce (otherwise the purpose of artificial organisms is lacking) in future generations, so I would be interested to see what applications and how in depth the considerations are.

"However critics, including some religious groups, condemned the work, with one organisation warning that artificial organisms could escape into the wild and cause environmental havoc or be turned into biological weapons."
As though we don't have enough biological weapons, people fear this one being made into one. Why would you bother? Release any number of readily available diseases at the height of virulence and/or infectiousness rather than genetically engineer a product from essentially scratch. Plus, long term impact is clearly one of the concerns for applying synthetic organisms. No one should imagine the people responsible for this are not aware of the amazing obstacles they'll need to overcome to convince people of their usefulness as well as quell all of the moral, ethical, environmental, etc., concerns.

People will fear it until it cures cancer or similar, and then after that it will just start seeming more and more normal.

i thank you so much for sharing this, i have just successfully shit a brick. bring on the future, i can't begin to imagine the medical benefits this may bring.

I'm actually suprised they were able to go through the Bush era developing this, mainly due to his lack of support for genetic research.

It slightly scares me on the account that when the technology is far long enough, you could in theory create a whole new human - which could create disastrous consequences, depending on how you look at it, although its highly unlikely.

That said, i'm of the belief that we need to progress the development on the front of scientific development - unfortunately people only start to see the benefits after several years and several million has been invested into the projects in question.

Bring on the synths.

--

Iron Wolf Studios

HOLY sh...

If its anything like the Universal Constructor in Deus Ex, if a virus could be made with the process, it likely could also be cured using the same process. So making a virus is pretty pointless unless you owned all the technology in the world that could do it- but then I'm lead to think the scientists were more interested in the monetary side of getting funding for their research and not so much TAKING OVER THE WORLD! lol- so in time I could see every science lab and hospital on the planet producing synths.

I for one welcome our new slimy synthetic bacteria super race overlords.

It´s the watermarking part that really bothers me.......................

Im not really that surprised, it was bound to happen sooner or later ...

Im not sure how they were able to put watermarks into the genetic code ... i mean ... how are they able to mark a portion of genetic code as "meaningless"

Find a bit that they already know is meaningless and drop it in there?