Oh fuck it's the future

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Yeah though I wonder if he and his team are going to aim for more. And really how much control would he and anyone else even have over anything they create in the near future should they decided to aim big.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Originally Posted by Geminex

Hey, no fair, I was gonna make an article about the North-korean attack on the south-korean ship. I had even thought of a joke involving Starcraft!

Anyway, yeah. North Korean Sub torpedoes South Korean Ship. Pretty clear evidence that this is exactly what's happened. South Korea's pissed, China's telling everyone to calm down, the US are being nice and moderate, Japan's insulting North Korea's mother, while North Korea is blaming the magical torpedo fairies and threatening war if sanctions are imposed upon them.
I like that last bit. They're officially still at war with South Korea, so aside from Nato members who could pummel them into submission, they really don't have anyone to declare war on. Unless they declare Double War on South Korea, which would be amusing.

Anyway, what do you guys think, what caused the attack? North Korea just being dicks? Or something more significant?

I;m chalking it up fully to North Korea being dicks. That's really how they roll. Probably just like "Fuck,we can get away with it. Why not?"

[Green Spanner]

I mean, you just know that the resulting artificial lifeforms will go berserk. That's totally what's going to happen.

[Osterbaum]

Originally Posted by Azisien

The privatization of this technology scares me somewhat a lot. And yet as a biologist I find it fascinating.

Summed up my feelings on the matter there.

As for North-Korea and this whole situation, it's getting old.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Guys we're not in the future if everything is not run by corporations. Did you not watch Robocop?
I'll be over here in my communist wonderland.

As for the NK thing getting old ,this is the biggest loss of life in regards to these two since the Korean War. So it's a bit bigger than normal incidents. It'll probably blow over without incident. I can't see anything happening.

[Premmy]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

My concern is less that he's smug after the fact and more that there's an indication he was smug before the fact and spent the last decade making this shit work because he fancied himself a designer scientist.

This is not the kind of guy I'm comfortable having do science.

I see, so what you're saying isRICHAAARRDDDSSSSSSS

[tacticslion]

Originally Posted by Green Spanner

I mean, you just know that the resulting artificial lifeforms will go berserk. That's totally what's going to happen.

Yeah, I like how the article flippantly mentions that possibility.

Originally Posted by Guardian

The single-celled organism has four "watermarks" written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and help trace its descendants back to their creator, should they go astray

(emphasis added)

"Oh, yeah, just in case it multiplies uncontrollably and we lose track of it, we can find it later! Sucks to be goats I guess."

At least they didn't use a humanocentric (word?) bacteria, I guess? I mean, I don't even know what their (current) genome does. Do we know what it eats, where it's likely to get that, how (and how rapidly) it multiplies, anything like that? I'm taking it that it's no longer the goat-infecting thing it once was.

[Bob The Mercenary]

Didn't they just transform one bacteria into another bacteria? Not create a brand new life form out of nothing?

Not that I'm trying to undermine the importance and awesomeness of the experiment. It's just that every newspaper out there is claiming they "created life from scratch" which is kinda stretching it.

[Geminex]

Well, I don't know too much about this, but the way I see it:

Scientists determine Bacteria's genome
Scientists chemically replicate Bacteria's genome without using the original DNA
Scientists remove DNA in one Bacteria's nucleus, replace it with the artificially-created DNA
The Bacterium that's had its DNA replaced changes according to the new DNA structure, as the new DNA is translated. When the bacterium replicates, its replica also have the new genome.

The red parts are the big deal. Basically, the fact that we've chemically created a DNA strand, means we can design any kind of genome, create the corresponding DNA strand(s) and from that, create any kind of organism, with any "attributes" we want. Of course, it's still easy with single-cell organisms, since their genome is fairly simple. Harder with larger organisms. We could, potentially create a genome for a dragon (provided we could determine exactly what the sequence of base pairs need to be, what proteins it'll need, exactly how it'll support homeostasis and survive), and then insert that DNA into a cell. Provided we could do that, we could just watch the dragon grow cell-by-cell. It'd be quite horribly difficult, use more processing power and research time than we could possibly muster (right now), but this is sort of a breakthrough, because now it's potentially possible at all. Before this, it really wasn't. The best we could do was cut-and-paste certain sequences into pre-existing DNA to make cells synthesise, say, insulin instead of lactose.
Now we can skip the cut-and-paste and just create whatever genome we want. We can create custom-built single cell-organisms for purposes of, say, manufacturing certain chemicals. Even with just single cells, there's a lot of potential here.

And, in a way, we are creating life, because they've chemically created RNA, and from that, DNA. And RNA is pretty much the root of life, since it can self-replicate, and synthesise its own replication.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Yeah I just read the paper- the new DNA is completely artifical which is an amazing achievement because DNA synthesis is not easy and difficult to control accurately enough.