I remember Craig Venter talking about synthetic life in the fall of 2007 with Carl Zimmer. Last summer he said that we'd have the first "synthetic species" by the end of the year. I haven't heard about it in 2010, have you? Anyone have info on what's going on here? No surprise that project deadlines get pushed back, it happens. But it seems like I've been hearing "wait 6 months" since the beginning of 2008. Does it actually work out so that only God can pull this off? Or is this vaporscience (OK, he got the genome part nailed down, but that was a while ago)?
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Whatever happened to "synthetic life"? permlink
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Posted on: March 11, 2010 11:55 PM, by Razib KhanFind more posts in: Life Science
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And he performed the first genome transplant and figured out how to make yeast churn out entire genomes of bacteria If this is limbo, it's a pretty productive place to be. If Venter does manage to pull this project off in 2014, will history really care much that he was off by 5 years?
Posted by: Carl Zimmer | March 12, 2010 12:44 AM
If Venter does manage to pull this project off in 2014, will history really care much that he was off by 5 years?
no. but if he keeps saying it'll happen "this year" until he gets it done in 2014, that should reduce our confidence that he can get it done between this date and that date. in fact, it should reduce his own confidence too i would think if he's being sincere, since it indicates that his model at any given moment of what's going on has serious holes which he can't account for.
though to make a fully informed guess on this sort of thing we should probably look at historical precedents for paradigm shifting science & engineering like this. getting to the moon. nuclear power. economically viable nuclear fusion. the human genome project.
Posted by: razib | March 12, 2010 2:11 AM
It was only four months away last August(!):
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6804599.ece
And it was supposed to be by the end of the year according to a Discover magazine blog:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/08/24/synthetic-life-by-the-years-end-yes-proclaims-craig-venter/
I guess they're still having technical difficulties "booting it up". I don't doubt that normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, given that it's Venter who's pushing this.
Posted by: IanW | March 12, 2010 7:19 AM
Am I the only one who thinks that injecting a synthetic genome into a denucleated organism is totally cheating and is not "synthesizing" life?
The digital part is "easy"--it's a technical feat, not a conceptual one.... making a cell is hard.
Posted by: miko | March 12, 2010 11:00 AM
A test of intelligent design. I've always though that it's an argument against ID, not only that organisms evidently were not designed from scratch and have non-optimal parts like the human shoulder, but that the trial and error process of evolution produces an enormous number of inferior or unviable organisms on the way toward producing a single new, superior trait. The idea of designing from scratch assumes that all problems can be anticipated, and the beauty of evolution is that you can have progress without anticipation just by pure empirical swarming, a sort of inelegant but powerful human-wave attack.
As I understand, we can expect Venter to declare himself to be God if he succeeds.
Posted by: John Emerson | March 12, 2010 11:08 AM
Why is the hype over "synthetic life"? What's so special about copying things? To begin with, it's not even a synthetic life. It's synthetic BAC. It is now (and has been for a long time) possible to chemically synthesize 500 aa-long protein. It will be difficult and enormously expensive - but certainly very possible. So? Would would this "synthetic protein" be any less breakthrough than the promised "synthetic life"? IMHO, neither is a scientific step forward - just a step toward better tweaking of existing technologies.
Posted by: DK | March 12, 2010 2:30 PM
I've been wondering about this lately also. It would be nice if they would talk publicly about why they haven't succeeded yet. The roadblocks they've encountered may prove more interesting than any ultimate success.
Posted by: Allan Niemerg | March 12, 2010 4:35 PM
Miko said: making a cell is hard
Making a cell is hard, yes. Much too hard. Impossibly hard, perhaps? For some perspective, let's keep in mind that as of now, designing a new protein fold that is a mere 100 aa-long is a major challenge and every time it happens it is viewed as a major scientific accomplishment.
Posted by: DK | March 12, 2010 7:31 PM
DK's comment is very pertinent. Creation of a self-replicating organism just isn't a big deal. Although a project of mild technical interest and, although, as with all research, might possibly have some useful spin-off it just doesn't warrant the hype.
John Emerson's remarks ring true except for the implication that Ventner's efforts in no way represent "starting from scratch"
It is an all too commonly overlooked fact that all the artifacts arising from what we rather arrogantly attribute to human "intelligent design" are also merely extensions of the observed evolutionary processes.
Indeed, nothing in nature seems to "start from scratch"
We observe only seemingly inevitable evolutionary processes driven by gravity, mediated by chance and filtered by the prevailing environment.
Such considerations, together with extrapolations that lead to a model which implies the development of our present Internet, by the same self-assembly process, into the next phase of the observed life process are presented in my recent book "Unusual Perspectives".
The latest edition of the book is available in electronic format for free download from the eponymous website.
Posted by: Peter G Kinnon | March 13, 2010 3:55 AM