Scientist Has Created Artificial Life

[Lyrica]

Family names were not what I was referring to. Our names and our lives are owned and so we are not free and that is the bottom line. I'll leave it at that. Agree or not -I do not care.

i can't hardly agree or disagree since i can't figure out what you mean. i'd like to though. it sounds deep

care to expand?

 

[Drudeboy]

i can't hardly agree or disagree since i can't figure out what you mean. i'd like to though. it sounds deep

care to expand?

Deep? I think he's been hanging out with hemply

 

[Lyrica]

Deep? I think he's been hanging out with hemply

sometimes deep and spacey are the same thing

sometimes not, but....

 

[PapaSquash]

Whether you use Betty Crocker's Cake Mix to save time, or grow your own wheat, harvest and grind your own flour, then get eggs from the chickens you hand raised, and milk from the cows that you personally bred... all to get the ingredients to make your cake..... the end result from both ways is still a cake.

Funny, I was going to use a similar analogy.

I'm not saying it isn't cake. I'm just saying he has to go a little further than using a bioengineered oraganism to generate his genome to call it a "scratch-baked" cake. He isn't using the yeast to save time; at present there isn't any other way.

Don't get me wrong, this still mind-blowingly impressive, but for "artificial life" I hold that you need to start with non-living materials. ( Even organic compounds are a bit of a cheat since "natural life" was needed to assemble them)

This is another step in bioengineering and yes, bioengineered products are patented. just ask Monsanto

 

[TOMMYTHUNDERS]

i imagine a world where all of our wars are fought by flying wolves, tigers that can shoot missiles out of their eyes, and sharks with legs that can breathe air.

this is the ultimate goal of this research.

 

[VastHorizon]

and of course they patented it. and if they manage to create some sort of thinking "life" they'll patent that too. a whole new era of slavery. if it's alive, you probably shouldn't be able to patent it in my opinion.

It's not the life that's being patented. It's the technology and the process.

 

[Lyrica]

It's not the life that's being patented. It's the technology and the process.

i understand that, however because of htat patent, ownership of the "being" or "life" in question is legally the creators no? to use or to sell as they wish, or even to licence, or sell the patent?? and if they create this "life" using their process, then according to legal tradition, they own it do they not?

my issue with this, probably won't actually show up for a long time. but in the case of "creating" life, patents certainly are not appropriate that allow ownership of that life in my opinion.

and my other issue is that if i read it right, they used a cloning technique. cloning is not creating, but copying. so i have my doubts as to whether or not they actually "created" it. like God said in the example, 'get your own dirt"

 

[TOMMYTHUNDERS]

nicole i think you're confused.
if someone wants to use the patent owner's process to create something they will have to pay the patent owner a sum of money agreed on by both parties to use their method.
if a research group is able to arrive at the same results by a different pathway then they can patent their pathway as well.

 

[PapaSquash]

The "life" can be patented. Strains of corn and wheat already are. You can't grow it without permission from the patent owner. They'll even get on your case if seeds are blown on to your land by the wind and they find "their" corn growing there. Weird but true.

 

[geochem1st]

........

Don't get me wrong, this still mind-blowingly impressive, but for "artificial life" I hold that you need to start with non-living materials. ( Even organic compounds are a bit of a cheat since "natural life" was needed to assemble them)

This is another step in bioengineering and yes, bioengineered products are patented. just ask Monsanto

You don't need 'natural life' to create organic compounds. In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler first manufactured the organic chemical urea, a constituent of urine, from the inorganic ammonium cyanate NH4OCN, in what is now known as the Wöhler synthesis. Since then quite a number of organic compounds have been synthsized from inorganic compounds without the aide of life.

There are no molecules that man has not made or cannot potentially make from inorganic precursors.

 

[TOMMYTHUNDERS]

You don't need 'natural life' to create organic compounds. In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler first manufactured the organic chemical urea, a constituent of urine, from the inorganic ammonium cyanate NH4OCN, in what is now known as the Wöhler synthesis. Since then quite a number of organic compounds have been synthsized from inorganic compounds without the aide of life.

There are no molecules that man has not made or cannot potentially make from inorganic precursors.

i make organic compounds every day.
perhaps papa squash is not sure of the definition of organic.

 

[Hamtone]

i make organic compounds every day.
perhaps papa squash is not sure of the definition of organic.

Isnt this your area of knowledge? Chemical eng stuff?

 

[Lyrica]

nicole i think you're confused.
if someone wants to use the patent owner's process to create something they will have to pay the patent owner a sum of money agreed on by both parties to use their method.
if a research group is able to arrive at the same results by a different pathway then they can patent their pathway as well.

no Tommy i am not confused. ask gibson who owns not only the patent to their guitars but the guitars themselves up until they either sell them, or licence the patent or even sell the patent.

according to the law i am aware of, if you own the patent to something, you also own the product you create using the patent--until you sell the product, or licence or sell the patent of course. -- unless someone else finds a different way to achieve the same ends of course, which is a whole 'nother patent.

 

[TOMMYTHUNDERS]

Isnt this your area of knowledge? Chemical eng stuff?

organic synthesis... yeah.

 

[PapaSquash]

OK I worded that badly. If you synthesize the organic compound then you didn't start your process with a material derived from "natural life". Obviously you'd have to be working with organic compounds at most stages of your process regardless of how they were derived.

If l take Geo's word for it that any molecule can be assembled from inorganic material (and there's no reason I shouldn't - I'll admit I didn't know that) Then really my objection to naturally-derived material has to go away. Using life-derived material then becomes a "betty-crocker" shortcut. As long as you could have made it from scratch.

 

[Aravind]

The term : Artificial Life, is open to much debate and detracts from the real work done by these guys and once again the meaning of life is subjective (If you say nein, remember, until very recently in our history plants were thought to be non-living creatures).

Objectively, what these guys have done seems to be a way to recreate the chemical interactions that are mimicked in 'live' organisms (single celled or otherwise). I have always been a firm believer that life is a mass of very complex self-propagating chemical reactions (Again open to a lot of debate).

It is the process that must be celebrated as an achievement in human advancement as opposed to debating if the process leads to 'natural' life or 'artificial' life.

Once again, a construct made of non-organic compounds (like nano-robots for instance) which self propagate would be an excellent candidate for a living thing.

Think virus : they are dead outside of their hosts, but alive within a host. They border on the fine line between live and dead.

All this in my humble o

 

[TOMMYTHUNDERS]

OK I worded that badly. If you synthesize the organic compound then you didn't start your process with a material derived from "natural life". Obviously you'd have to be working with organic compounds at most stages of your process regardless of how they were derived.

If l take Geo's word for it that any molecule can be assembled from inorganic material (and there's no reason I shouldn't - I'll admit I didn't know that) Then really my objection to naturally-derived material has to go away. Using life-derived material then becomes a "betty-crocker" shortcut. As long as you could have made it from scratch.

you realize anything with carbon in it is organic, right?
hence you cannot make the organic from inorganic starting materials.
you can have inorganic catalysts like bistriphenylphosphine palladium (II) dichloride (the ligands are organic, but the palladium is what makes the reaction go) (also this catalyst is very dear to my heart), but you need organic starting materials (for example using this catalyst in a sonogashira coupling you need a terminal alkyne and an organic halide), an example of a purely inorganic catalyst would be nickel bromide, very simple.
i think you are using the term organic incorrectly. say what you mean.
a diamond is organic.
i think you mean "biological" when you say "organic".

 

[Splattle101]

...Even organic compounds are a bit of a cheat since "natural life" was needed to assemble them...

Just on a point of scienctific nomenclature, an organic compound is one which contains carbon. Full stop.

The concept that organic compounds are called organic because they're made by living things is actually back to front. They are called organic compounds because they are what living things are made from.

Cabon dioxide is an organic compound. It's a compound because it contains two types of atom (carbon and oxygen) that are joined by a chemical bond (a covalent bond in this instance), and one of the types of atom is carbon. Therefore it's an organic compound.

 

[PapaSquash]

you realize anything with carbon in it is organic, right?
hence you cannot make the organic from inorganic starting materials.
you can have inorganic catalysts like bistriphenylphosphine palladium (II) dichloride (the ligands are organic, but the palladium is what makes the reaction go) (also this catalyst is very dear to my heart), but you need organic starting materials (for example using this catalyst in a sonogashira coupling you need a terminal alkyne and an organic halide), an example of a purely inorganic catalyst would be nickel bromide, very simple.
i think you are using the term organic incorrectly. say what you mean.
a diamond is organic.
i think you mean "biological" when you say "organic".

You are correct - I am using the word organic when I mean biological. Thank you.