Labs say they have nearly all the tools to make artificial life
sun-sentinel.com
Science on verge of new `Creation'
Labs say they have nearly all the tools to make artificial life
By Ronald Kotulak
Tribune science reporter
Posted March 28 2004
More than 3.5 billion years after nature transformed non-living matter into living things, populating Earth with a cornucopia of animals and plants, scientists say they are finally ready to try their hand at creating life.
If they succeed, humanity will enter a new age of "living technology," where harnessing the power of life to spontaneously adapt to complex situations could solve problems that now defy modern engineering.
Scientists eagerly talk of a new world of ultra-small living machines, where marvelously made-to-order cells heal the body, clean up pollutants, transform electronics and communication, and much more.
The researchers say it may be possible to make sweaters that mend themselves. Or computers that fix their own glitches.
Though some experts see this new technology as providing unlimited benefits, others worry about the moral appropriateness of human-made life and the introduction of new species with the potential to evolve into creatures that could run amok.
"It's certainly true that we are tinkering with something very powerful here," said artificial-life researcher Steen Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
"But there's no difference between what we do here and what humans have always done when we invented fire, transistors and ways to split the atom," he said. "The more powerful technology you unleash, the more careful you have to be."
Such concern is escalating as more than 100 laboratories study processes involved in the creation of life, and scientists say for the first time that they have just about all the pieces they need to begin making inanimate chemicals come alive.
Unlike any other technology invented by humans, creating artificial life will be as jarring to our concepts of ourselves as discovering living creatures on other planets in the universe would be. It also would bring into sharper focus the age-old questions of "What is life?" and "Where do we come from?"
"The ability to make new forms of life from scratch--molecular living systems from chemicals we get from a chemical supply store--is going to have a profound impact on society, much of it positive, but some of it potentially negative," said Mark Bedau, professor of philosophy and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Ore., and editor-in-chief of the Artificial Life Journal.
"Aside from the vast scientific insights that will come, there will be vast commercial and economic benefits, so much so that it's hard to contemplate in concrete detail what many of them will be," he said.
But the first artificial life also is likely to shock people's religious and cultural belief systems.
"People from many different backgrounds have special views about what life is: how it originates, the special sanctity it has, the special dignity it deserves," Bedau said. "The ability to make new forms of life will perturb all of that. We need to think through the implications and how we are going to react to them."
`Biology revolution'
Still, artificial life now seems so attainable that the number of U.S. labs working in the field jumped from about 10 four decades ago to more than 100 today.
Spearheading the drive is the European Union's Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution project, recently established with a grant of about $9 million. This month PACE is scheduled to open the first institution devoted exclusively to creating artificial life, called the European Center for Living Technology, in Venice, staffed by European and U.S. researchers.
"It's a synthetic biology revolution," said John McCaskill, professor of theoretical biochemistry at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany, who is overseeing the European Union's artificial life program.
"We obviously don't want to be too polemic about how rapidly this is going to transform society," he said. "But I think that we are seeing a new feature of science and technology where systems are tonomously adaptive and that this is a significant component of the design process."
Scientists are trying to unravel the grand mystery of how life originated on Earth, and possibly Mars and other places in the universe. How is it that when atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen are organized in the right way, for example, they make a carrot? Arranging far more atoms in a different way produces a human being.
Life is generally not thought of as being mechanical. But a cell basically is a miniature machine in which non-living atoms are constantly being rearranged to make the moving parts that imbue it with life.
The cell, the basic unit of all living things, becomes much more than all of its parts. New properties emerge that give a cell the power to repair itself, reproduce and adapt to changing environments.
A key element of all living systems is the ability to evolve through natural selection. Things that are successful survive, while those that fail to adapt die off. The idea is to incorporate this evolutionary design process into technology that people can use, making things that are complicated and well-adapted without having to figure out in advance all the problems that could arise.
"Our technology right now is facing a complexity crisis. We need to make things that are more complicated if we want to have new kinds of functionality," Bedau said. "We want to have better telephone switching networks, better computers, better spacecraft, but we don't know how to do it."
"If we could make life, we would have a new insight into how to make things more complicated," he said. "We could apply these principles in other areas. Life is very, very complicated, but it also repairs itself, it organizes itself and it adapts spontaneously to changes. It would be nice to have a space shuttle that can do those things or a telephone switching network that can grow and adapt in an organic way."
It is a dream long pursued by scientists who now believe that it may be possible to create the first artificial unit of life in the next 5 to 10 years.
"We've been saying that for the last 50 years," said David W. Deamer, a pioneering professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "What makes it different now is that we have a critical mass of people interested in the field and some recent breakthrough discoveries."
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