SansPretense

First, does anyone actually read this blog? If so, give me a clue as to who you are…

Now, scientists are pretty close to creating the first totally artificial life form since Hillary Clinton started running for president. Here’s the article (and if the article from the link differs from this one, it must be because they changed it earlier to hide their evil conservative bias):

WASHINGTON –Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”

“Creating [wet life] has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste, and most importantly: they will provide a necessary labor source for doing jobs that true Americans don’t want to do.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

– A wall to keep bad wet-life out, allow good ones in, and the ability for them to multiply.

– A system that controls the functions of the wet-life, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

– A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment and food, then changes it into something to sell very cheaply.

One of the leaders…… in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a wall — is “not a big problem.” Scientists are using Mexicans in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting the wet-life agree on a working system.

His idea is that once the wall is made, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over and wet-life will accept thier roles in society.

“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could “run amok,” but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem. One only has to look at the pre-civil war era through to the 1960s to see the best ways to prevent a take-over.

“When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in this heat we’ve been experiencing,” he said. “But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen.”

(This version CORRECTS Bedau quote to “shed new light”)