alt Hacker News> “It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work.
That is the holy grail? I get that the goal is to "grow" biofuels, plastic, fertilizer, drugs, or whatever else we can imagine. But is that worth the many apocalyptic sci-fi outcomes we can imagine?
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All we need is an at-home DNA printer and the world or life as we know it can be forever changed by a kid and an AI.
Its really easy now to engineer novel deadly viruses thanks to alphafold3
I'm not a biologist so I can't say for sure, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to edit an existing living organism to produce those products than it would be to create completely from scratch. We already do this with the process known as precision fermentation. We've gotten very good at editing genomes via CRISPR and related techniques and are only getting better
> That is the holy grail?
At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.
We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.
That is absolutely fucking wild.
Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
What a time to be alive.
While this is an impressive step forward, there remains an extremely long way, probably of several decades, until being able to design and synthesize a cell comparable in complexity with a bacterium.
The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.
Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.
The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).
Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.
The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.
> That is the holy grail?
If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.
(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)
I think one useful application of this would be life built on stuff that doesn't interact with our cells - artifical bases, nucleotides and all. Then we could have non-biological self-replicating robots
Yeah, imagine if one day it will become trivial to blow up the world. Enough people hate humanity that they would do it, by tomorrow if they could. Seems like out exponential growth in technology will eventually lead up to that. If not actual nuclear explosion, then biological weapons. Would we need to enslave humans not to do it. How would that work.
Have you not seen Jurassic Park?
Man, I am so tired of the cynicism around here.
Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.
Yes, mechanically constructing life would be absolutely stupendous for science. The real tragedy of modern sci-fi is that everyone read the books and decided it was reality.
“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”
Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.