“Scientists could create the first new form of artificial life within months after a landmark breakthrough in which they turned one bacteria into another,” Roger Highfield reports for The Telegraph.
“In a development that has triggered unease and excitement in equal measure, scientists took the whole genetic makeup – or genome – of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species,” Highfield reports.
“This then began to grow and multiply in the lab, turning into the first species in the process,” Highfield reports.
“The team that carried out the first ‘species transplant’ says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory,” Highfield reports. “If that experiment worked, it would mark the creation of a synthetic lifeform.”
“The breakthrough occurred at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, the team reports today in the journal Science. One of its editors called it “a landmark in biological engineering,'” Highfield reports.
“The team wanted to develop a way to move a complete genome into a living cell, chosing the simplest and smallest kind, a bacterium. In all, of the millions of bacteria that they tried the transplant on, it only worked one time in every 150,000,” Highfield reports. “Dr Venter likened it to ‘changing a Macintosh computer into a PC by inserting a new piece of software’ and stressed it would be more difficult in other kinds of cells, which have enzymes to snip the DNA of invaders.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “jay” for the heads up.]
Holy Bacterium Boot Camp, Batman! That poor bacterium: got turned inside-out, went from transparent to opaque, inexplicably increased in complexity, became hideously misshapen, and now it swims backwards! Change it back from a PC into a Mac, Dr. Venkman, er… Venter, change the poor thing back!
Obviously, this news is not Apple-related beyond a passing quote mentioning Mac, but we would have posted this article regardless, as we sometimes do with articles we find extremely interesting. Plus, we got to make fun of PCs while referencing Batman and Ghostbusters, so there’s no way we could pass it up. 
You know where this is all going to end up, don’t you?
They aren’t really making life if they are changing the DNA of something that is already alive. Right? We don’t even know how life is created in the first place, so how are we supposed to make it ourselves?
Too Hot! is essentially right.
The only quibbles I have with the analysis are semantic. The term “synthetic genome” can mean many different things. In some senses it is practical. In others, it is many, many years away.
To those that express shock, well, that is only because you are totally ignorant and taking this journalists wording at face value. This advance, while exciting for lab work, really is not currently consequential from a bioethics standpoint, nor a biosafety standpoint. Genes have from other species are being put into bacteria every single day in labs across the world already. Groups of genes, sometimes, too.
This technology is nothing to be afraid of nor are there any more serious risks than molecular biology that has been going on for 30ish years.
Excellent stuff. Make some heat and acid resistant bacteria that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen and set it loose in the atmosphere of Venus. A few thousand years later you have a nice habitable planet just next door
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“The team that carried out the first ‘species transplant’ says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory,”
That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time. I guess their lab must have one of those new DNA typewriters that came out this week (lost in the iPhone hype). It only has four keys: CGTA!
I would have been more impressed if they had done the equivalent of turning a PC into a bona fide Macintosh running OS X Leopard… and if the resulting offspring reproduced into Macs WITH iPhones.
Is it true they tried to create an artificial brain cell inside Steve Ballmer’s head because they felt sorry for the first one being so lonely?
What, no picture of Ballmer?!?!?!
He’s living proof that Microsoft invented artificial life first!
So they take two life forms and reduce that number to one. That is not creating life, but destroying it.
Well this is a nice breakthrough. Of course other living creatures have been doing this for a while, viruses being a good example. You might argue that viruses are not quite alive but hey, it’s close.
There are a few other species that do something similar to this. Some fungi, like Rhizoctonia sp. perform “anastomosis”, where they physcially merge and exchange nuclei, which contain the nuclear material.
Nothing new here, save that the humans are taking another step to what is already out there.
Let the imping continue.
@ Road Warrior “A Mac is a PC now since the Intel switch”
from that logic one would have to make the assumption that a Mac is purely what the processor inside the machine is.
Its a part of it, sure, but not everything. Its like saying every person with a healthy heart is the same thing. Well they are not the same thing, they all have something in common, but the brain (OS) is very different.
Youre saying that a linux machine, a Mac and a PC are all the same because they have the same family of processors?
Obviously this isn’t the case, Apple are the only ones that actually have control over the hardware and the software, and can tailor everything to work together. But even thats not the most important thing, The most important thing is the OS. I thought we’d covered this along time ago.
Once GWB hears about it, it’s a goner.
What does this have to do with the iPhone?!?!?!?
Once GWB hears about it, it’s a goner.
Not once the new life form is considered an ILLEGHAL life form, then he works for amnesty for it
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illegal – H is too close to G this morning
ET says ‘iPhone Hoooome’
Jurassic Park anyone?
This is exactly why we need a Death Ray on the iPhone! E-mail, Calls, Music, eliminating rampant biological threats – it all fits.
Talk about playing God….
Too bad this didn’t come out a few weeks ago. We could have created “homo-line-standus” to wait for our iPhones for us.
Weird. All I can say is
Why?