Holy Grail

When I was a young teenager, busily denying the existence of the deity to all comers, the artificial creation of life was an important milestone on the road to getting rid of said deity. Something which was important to many people through the course of the 20th century and something which got off to a number of false, if interesting & informative, starts.

And now it seems, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are actually getting there - albeit in a rather messy way, not the sort of thing that was envisaged those years ago at all. Not at all like brewing up a dinosaur, rather in the way that one might make a cake, and hatching him (or her) out of a large bottle.

Skimming the paper at reference 1, the idea seems to be to start with the smallest known bacteria, the mycoplasma, generally parasitic on vertebrates (which is why they can be so small) and sometimes causing trouble. These mycoplasma have of the order of 1,000 thousand base pairs - with, by way of comparison, a human having maybe 3 million, depending on what exactly you count as counting.

You then work on this, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, getting it down to around 500 thousand base pairs, roughly 500 genes - the smallest possible life, rather than artificial life, being the main target of this work.

You then manufacture genetic material according to that recipe and inject it into a cell rather larger than that of the original mycoplasma and where it will grow & reproduce rather better. Growing into the collections of small spherical objects illustrated in their paper. While what I choose to show here is their considerable success in working out what the remaining genes are for.

There is talk of actually making the genetic material from scratch, rather than working on stuff borrowed from a real bacteria. But that apart, I think what they are doing is on the margins; near enough artificial creation but not quite. Not quite enough to satisfy the teenage part of me - but, nevertheless, quite an achievement.

Reference 1: 'Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome' by Clyde A. Hutchison and others, from the 25th March 2016 issue of the Science magazine.