- Feb 14, 2004
- 51,992
- 7,419
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Scientists create New Life Form in lab
- Thread starter Kaido
- Start date
CrackRabbit
Lifer
- Mar 30, 2001
- 16,642
- 62
- 91
ViviTheMage
Lifer
"The man-made chromosome will be transplanted into an existing bacterial cell and is expected to take control of the cell. When the synthetic DNA takes over, the cell will be a new species."
Create new life form is a little misleading, more like they modded one into another.
Create new life form is a little misleading, more like they modded one into another.
How long until some scientist fucks up and kills us all I wonder? Between this and the mini-black holes they're creating in the particle accelerator at CERN I'm starting to become a little uncomfortable with modern scientific research...
Printer Bandit
Lifer
- Mar 16, 2005
- 13,856
- 109
- 106
Life is just to define an organism that reproduces itself. Now something that is aware of anything is a different matter.
One day some 16 year old kid is going to cook up a bug in his mom's kitchen that will wipe us all out. If the military industrial complex doesn't get us first.
Stanley Miller created the building blocks of life, not life. They didn't prove that live would have evolved from those amino acids, just that carbon could be made into amino acids.
Jeff7
Lifer
- Jan 4, 2001
- 41,596
- 20
- 81
And in the quite exceedingly unlikely event that we are wiped out, it would be to the Universe little more than natural selection.
That's how it works here - a life form has some adaptation which is not advantageous, and it dies out. On a larger scale, humans may have developed intelligence and technology at a time when our animal instincts were still too powerful. Maybe nature's little Earthly experiment will fizzle out. Humanity wipes itself out - format, and try again in another billion years. By then, a lot of Earth's uranium will have decayed, so maybe whatever intelligent life form has arisen by then will at least be lacking one method of destroying itself. Maybe it'll evolve to a point where its animal instincts can be controlled, or eliminated entirely, when it can be intelligent without the will to destroy.
I'm not worried about a scientific experiment going wrong and killing us all. I'm worried about a scientific experiment going perfectly right, but then someone else takes the idea and perverts it into a weapon. This bioengineering thing - it could have incredible uses. Bacteria which could somehow reverse degredation within our own cells, or bacteria crafted to fight disease. It's an immense use to humanity. But then, here come our animal instincts - how can we use it to kill/dominate other people? Maybe produce a bacteria that attacks and dissolves human nervous tissue, or maybe just one that puts out copious amounts of some horrific toxin.
There you go, a wonderous creation, made by intelligence, perverted into an implement of destruction by animal instinct.
Hopefully any of that made any sense whatsoever, because I've been awake way too long.
The ignorance is strong in this thread.
Scientists have been doing this for years. It's called recombinant DNA, and is the basis for the production of a large number of pharmaceuticals and biochemicals, and all GMO products. Molecular biologists can tailor DNA to do whatever they want and can insert it into cells to make them do whatever they want. In this case the rDNA is entirely synthetic, which is relatively easy to do.
Scientists have been doing this for years. It's called recombinant DNA, and is the basis for the production of a large number of pharmaceuticals and biochemicals, and all GMO products. Molecular biologists can tailor DNA to do whatever they want and can insert it into cells to make them do whatever they want. In this case the rDNA is entirely synthetic, which is relatively easy to do.
Well, I'm looking at the big picture
The field of Biotech is growing more and more important. The deeper we keep getting into every molecular significance of our DNA the more able we are to reverse engineer life ultimately.
You put way too much thought into what was essentially a joke
But either way, here's a :beer: Maybe it will help you sleep 
Throckmorton
Lifer
- Aug 23, 2007
- 16,829
- 3
- 0
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