How far are humans from designing and creating unique new forms of organic life?

[Doranian123]

From its physical form, to its mental capacity, its instincts and temperament, do you think humans are close to being able to design modded forms of life from scratch?

[Doctor Amadeus]

Honestly I would say not far, in fact I am pretty confident than our next evolutionary link will be genetically engineered and I do not mean like 100s of years from now, I think well before A.I.

[Independent voter]

From



About -1,000 years.

[Doctor Amadeus]

[IMG]

From

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About -1,000 years.

Yes humans did that to them. They didn’t do that to themselves.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

From



About -1,000 years.

That's not designed from scratch. You included the source.

[Uzkin]

An artificial bacterium cell, capable of self-replication, has already been created:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/52

These bacteria represent artificial life in a sense that their DNA is entirely synthetically prepared; the DNA was, however, built by using an existing bacterial DNA as a model / starting point. Therefore, the resulting bacterium was pretty much the same as its "naturally-occurring" model, with the exception of some alterations and "water marks" added to the DNA during the synthesis.

[Ghostpanther]

An artificial bacterium cell, capable of self-replication, has already been created:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/52

These bacteria represent artificial life in a sense that their DNA is entirely synthetically prepared; the DNA was, however, built by using an existing bacterial DNA as a model / starting point. Therefore, the resulting bacterium was pretty much the same as its "naturally-occurring" model, with the exception of some alterations and "water marks" added to the DNA during the synthesis.

Did you over look this part of your link?

Efforts to understand all this new genomic information have spawned numerous new computational and experimental paradigms, yet our genomic knowledge remains very limited. No single cellular system has all of its genes understood in terms of their biological roles. Even in simple bacterial cells, do the chromosomes contain the entire genetic repertoire? If so, can a complete genetic system be reproduced by chemical synthesis starting with only the digitized DNA sequence contained in a computer?

It is full of speculation. And in no way is a creation of life. At the best, it is a artificial simulation.Yes, great strides have been made in understanding DNA sequences, but humans are far, far away from ever creating a living organism. If ever.

[Uzkin]

Did you over look this part of your link?

Efforts to understand all this new genomic information have spawned numerous new computational and experimental paradigms, yet our genomic knowledge remains very limited. No single cellular system has all of its genes understood in terms of their biological roles. Even in simple bacterial cells, do the chromosomes contain the entire genetic repertoire? If so, can a complete genetic system be reproduced by chemical synthesis starting with only the digitized DNA sequence contained in a computer?

It is full of speculation. And in no way is a creation of life. At the best, it is a artificial simulation.Yes, great strides have been made in understanding DNA sequences, but humans are far, far away from ever creating a living organism. If ever.

Nothing you bolded above contradicts anything I said. Your quote was from the Introduction chapter of the paper: in that part, as is customary, the authors present some outstanding research questions to which their study (to be discussed later in the paper) aims to give answers.

So I disagree with your statement about humans being far away from creating a living organism. The research article I linked reports pretty much just that: how to create a living organism starting from a digitized DNA sequence stored in some electronic database. The DNA sequence they used was that of a "naturally occurring" species so the resulting organism resembled an already-existing bacterial cell (with some alterations to the DNA sequence for funsies). Nevertheless, the bacterium was synthetically created (in a sense specified in the paper).

Thus, it already is possible to create artificial life by using the genetic data of an existing bacterium as model. However, the current knowledge of genomes and their expression is still too limited to design entirely new artificial lifeforms from scratch i.e. without using some natural organism as "reference". They could synthesize any kind of DNA sequence for the bacterial cell if they wanted to but the chances of creating a functional artificial bacterium via random trial and error are ridiculously small. The "tools" are there, though.

[Ghazan Julio]

Did you over look this part of your link?

Efforts to understand all this new genomic information have spawned numerous new computational and experimental paradigms, yet our genomic knowledge remains very limited. No single cellular system has all of its genes understood in terms of their biological roles. Even in simple bacterial cells, do the chromosomes contain the entire genetic repertoire? If so, can a complete genetic system be reproduced by chemical synthesis starting with only the digitized DNA sequence contained in a computer?

It is full of speculation. And in no way is a creation of life. At the best, it is a artificial simulation.Yes, great strides have been made in understanding DNA sequences, but humans are far, far away from ever creating a living organism. If ever.

How are you sure we haven't already done it and we just haven't discovered it? You need to actually think about things.

[Underverse]

Not close at all

[Nihilist74]

If we can develop some really good computer AI, it could aid us in genetic engineering. If we don't destroy ourselves, i would say in 100-200 years. A computer AI would be able to observe and search through genome's much faster than a human could and decipher it.