Kybernetica.com > An Artificial Life (from Daniel Frankel's blog)

[Nature Network Blog Posts] One of my groups aims is to investigate the origins of life on Earth, in the hope of gaining useful information for the creating of an artificial cell, well an entity which has the minimal characteristics of life, a protocell. Our approach is rather bottom up, as we have to assume that complex biological molecules were not available…we really are looking for that “moment”

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[Biomedicine on Display] Is building a protocell to model early life on earth a topic for ...: I doubt that scientists in a Danish medical research institution (not even to think of a hospital) would survive for long if they focused their research efforts on the origin of life. Because even though such research may be very important for the understanding of cell functions in the long perspective, there is no immediate medical payoff; no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s in sight whatsoever.

[The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel] "Origins of Life in a Lab": From Amino Acids to Apes with iPods: We're working on our own version, with the Toyama School of Pharmaceutical Sciences engineering entirely artificial DNA based on synthetic basepairs.  The artificial genes are suitable for use in genetic engineering, and have been shown to be more stable, and can even resist DNAase chemicals which dissolve human DNA.

[Nerdshit] Is This Life?: Indeed, in attempts to create artificial life Chen along with Steen Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Laboratory have thrown out much of the conventions found in nature. They’ve turned the protocell model inside out, designing a micelle .

[Soft Machines] Will nanotechnology lead to a truly synthetic biology? « Soft Machines: Within the next fifty years, there’s a serious chance that we’ll make this discovery, not by finding life on a distant planet or indeed by such aliens visiting us on earth, but by creating this new form of life ourselves. This will be the logical conclusion of using the developing tools of nanotechnology to develop a “bottom-up” version of synthetic biology, which instead of rearranging and redesigning the existing components of “normal” biology, as currently popular visions of synthetic biology propose, uses the inspiration of biology to synthesise entirely novel systems.

[Micheal Thouton Sun] Triple Helix: Designing a New Molecule of Life: Considering the detailed microbiology of contemporary life-forms, it seems very clear that RNA is probably more primordial and central to life than DNA and proteins. This one molecule can carry both the genotype (the genetic sequence information) of an organism and the phenotype (catalytic functions).

[RichardDawkins.net : The Latest Updates] 'Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years' by Seth Borenstein, AP ...: And the fact that the new artificial life is "going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab...But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen." will likely encourage the theological idea that God is the supreme designer and infinitely more intelligent (yet somehow simpler) than us humans.

[The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel] Scientists on Brink of Creating Synthetic Life: Szostak is optimistic about getting nucleotides, the building blocksof DNA, to form a working genetic system. His idea is that once thecontainer is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the rightproportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

[The Panda's Thumb] Experts in creationism trials -- Shallit be? - The Panda's Thumb: One of these is the enormous gap between the most complex “protocell” model systems produced in the laboratory and the simplest living cells. Anyone familiar with the ultrastructural and biochemical complexity of the genus Mycoplasma, for example, should have serious doubts about the relevance of any of the various laboratory “protocells” to the actual historical origin of cells.

[Telic Thoughts] Ambiguity Tolerance - Telic Thoughts: Protocells imaginary. Even if in the far future they reproduced the origins of life on a planet modified to exactly match ancient Earth, you would continue to claim there is an artificial informational link to a designer and that the origin of messaging and coding systems .

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