RE: Scientists create synthetic life.
May 21, 2010 at 4:48 am
(This post was last modified: May 21, 2010 at 4:53 am by The_Flying_Skeptic.)
in the video Too Dark posted: "Venture's team went DNA shopping and bought more than a thousand short strands of DNA. In the lab, they joined them all together in the right order to create a complete man made copy of the genome of a simple bacteria. then they put it into the cell of a different strain of bacteria, converting it to the new man made strain." - t 02:15 Where are you reading that Venture's team created the genome from scratch?
What's important is that people don't think or use this information to suggest that an organism has been created entirely from scratch when at most they created a functional, distinct genome out of short strands of DNA. If you are reading that they indeed created the DNA that makes up the genome from scratch, which I have no problem with, then even better (then we should know the conditions that are required to create DNA strands in nature or at least be closer to understanding how nature could produce DNA strands), but the media is still exaggerating on what has actually been created thus potentially confusing a lot of people.
What's important is that people don't think or use this information to suggest that an organism has been created entirely from scratch when at most they created a functional, distinct genome out of short strands of DNA. If you are reading that they indeed created the DNA that makes up the genome from scratch, which I have no problem with, then even better (then we should know the conditions that are required to create DNA strands in nature or at least be closer to understanding how nature could produce DNA strands), but the media is still exaggerating on what has actually been created thus potentially confusing a lot of people.
