So what is life?

[bellinghman]

According to this BBC report, a virus has been recreated from scratch, using DNA fragments and the known sequence of its genome. The result was apparently indistinguishable from the natural virus, as able to infect and reproduce as its forebears.

If you think that a virus is alive, then this is a case of life having being recreated in the laboratory.

If you don't (and a form of life that can be crystallised is admittedly stretching things), then they haven't, yet.

But how long will it be before a simple bacterium can also be constructed. Yes, it's going to be a hell of a lot harder, since you will have to create all the organelles, the full running cellular machinery which isn't needed for a virus (which is 'only' DNA), but I'd not bet against it.

Comments

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Life is that quality which you lose by falling out of a giant cup two miles up in the sky.

Easy.

[songster.livejournal.com]

I'd bet against it for a good long while yet - even thie simplest mycobacteria have a few hundred genes, and we have no idea what many of them are for.

Furthermore, it's cheating even to say they've created the virus from scratch - OK, they synthesised the DNA from oligonucleotides, but they had to use enzymes to join the oligos together (and I think also so make the oligos, but that may not be the case any more), and where do enzymes come from, boys and girls? And I'm not sure that you can synthesise the individual nucleotides without either using an enzymatic step or simply purifying the nucleotides from some living organism.

We're still quite a way from starting with *nothing* that's life-derived and ending up with even a functional virus, let alone a bacterial cell.

I'd give it at least a decade till someone claims to have made a bacterium, but I further bet they'll turn out to have purified their starting materials (enzymes, nucleotides, amino acids, what have you) from living cells. To do it with chemistry alone... I'd be surprised to see it within my lifetime, to be honest.