Consequent Infidel

whatsup all....

I'v been looking into that great site "Talk.origins" and i'v been to this page :

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html

regarding the possibility of abiogenesis....

so..since abiogenesis is possible....can Man to produce a "life form" as well ?

Roller

Hi!

What abiogenesis experiment resulted in, and I'm only familiar with Miller-Urey one, is that in some hypothesized early Earth atmosphere certain amino acids resulted (valine and proline, among others). Amino acids are key components of living organisms.

As far as to "creating" life goes, I think the closest we've come is synthesizing artificial chromosome in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast). That was accomplished by assembling the DNA molecule chemically. From what I know, that’s as far as we got. BUT! That was back in '83. Now that we have complete genome sequence...

Doubting Didymus

We can synthesise viruses so far. Anything as complex as a bacteria is beyond our technology at the moment. Evolution has the advantage of already having just-slightly-less-complex replicating cells to build on, while we would have to synthesise from scratch.

faust

it really depends on what you mean by "produce" and i don't just mean the sarcastic response of, "sure, i put these two mice together and produced a whole litter" though that could fall under the idea.
Do you mean produce in the sense of taking pure non-organic elements plus carbon (which by chemical defn is organic) and ending up with a replicating cell? theoretically yes, it could be done at great pain and expense and of no real benefit.
For example, you could take a microbe with a very small volume (for faster processing, b/c of less molecules) and replicate it in the presence of elements in a form it can use until all the molecules of some of the cells are ones provided by you. If you want to get picky, you can use radioactive isotopes. Bam, you have produced a cell made of entirely human supplied raw elements, based on an existing template and existing replication machinery, but made out of only what you provided.
Do you mean produce one from scratch via mixing chemicals together? Sure, again no problem, though with similar result. Theoretically you could build nucleotide by nucleotide the sequences of proteins needed to generate operative cellular machinery and attach them to artificial chromosomes (we have those now already). you'd have most of what you need after that. It wouldn't be too hard to slap together some ribosomes/ribozymes for duplication and translation, and add artificially produced versions of all the proteins and things needed inside a cell. Toss it in a jar of phosopholipids and shake until you luck out and get a bubble of phospholipids encasing a chromosome, the protiens you need, and a ribosome or two, and more than likely it'll fire right up and start living the good life.
But that would also be just like whatever microbe you used to get the orginial dna sequence templates from. Artificial, in name only. It would be like building a car by yourself from only the smallest parts, which you made yourself from looking at all the parts of a pre-existing dissassembled car. You made everything, you put it together, it works. Is it a Ford or not?

I presume "produce" means something different from what i've described here, and you're welcome to clarify what you mean, i'll answer as best i can. My guess is that you're wondering if we can replicate the environment of early earth and run this simulation long enough to give us cells... maybe, but it would be harder than the above scenarios.

If i, knowing what functions of proteins and other molecules are needed in a cell, along with the detailed tertiary and quaternary structure of each one, I suppose I could build a cell which would have not a single bit of matching sequence to any known species of anything, yet operate in exactly the same ways as a current microbe... but what is the point? except to piss off a fundy and that's enough to make me want to do it