Darwin's Lab: Scientists on Brink of Creating Life
Scientists, including Harvard Medical School's Jack Szostak, expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life" created the first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA.
Szostak predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane using fatty acids — is "not a big problem."
"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."
And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.
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.
Szostak is optimistic about 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.
"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.
"When these things are created," Bedau added, "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," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen.
"We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."
Posted by Casey Kazan.
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