For three decades, David Deamer, a leading biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been saying that scientists would create synthetic life in "five or 10 years."

Finally, he might to be right. "The momentum is building," he says. "We're knocking at the door."

A Loose Definition Of Life

Life is a complicated business- too complicated for easy definitions. But without a definition, the 'how to make life' quest could never have begun and we won't be able to make any judgements on the many successes so far

Here is what Francis Collins, the Leader of the Human Genome Project has to say about what is living and what is not

'if you wanted a short list of the properties of something that we would call living: It would need to be self-replicating—that is, it could copy itself stably
into many other copies. It would need to be stable over time. And it would
need to be able to survive without the input of lots of other complicated
proteins or other large molecules that aren't generally available, floating
around in the atmosphere. Sure, it could have some sort of media that it
lived in, some sugars and some salts, and things like that. But let's not
require it to need cytochrome P450.' *

Collins is saying that any artificial organism which cannot feed itself in a similar way to ordinary life forms doesn't deserve to be called new life.

Let's agree with that and be tough on the new science of synthetic biology. Synbio has still to earn its spurs.

_{* from Nova PBS}

Leaving aside the viruses (there is serious debate if they are truly living or not), the simplest living things are bacteria. They have a cell wall, a cell membrane, a bundle of DNA and cytoplasm- a jelly- like substance that the cell contents float in.

In the cosy and protected world of a test tube, the cell wall isn't important. That leaves:

• DNA
• a cell membrane
• cytoplasm and all the complicated things that cytoplasm contains, most especially ribosomes, the places where proteins are manufactured and ATP, the chemical at the heart of energy metabolism.

If you can create these basic elements from simple chemicals- a handful of dust- and persuade them to perform the kind of tasks that Collins describes, you can really say that you have created a new kind of life.

J Craig Venter

DNA is already being made from scratch. Craig Venter and his company have manufactured DNA that they hope will soon control the activities of a simple bacterium. Venter's team reduced the number of genes to the minimum  that would maintain cell functions and allow for reproduction. They then learnt now to manufacture this minimal DNA from simple chemicals.The only problem left is to persude a bacterium to start making use of them.

Venter is hoping to announce a new artificial form of life any time now. As astonishing as this is, it would still be a few steps away from creating life from scratch.

The video right gives an idea of the huge potential of Venter's work. It also gives an idea of how quickly genetic science is moving. The human genome took 13 years to sequence. The same job could now be done in a few days. It is this kind of progress that makes scientists believe artificial life is just around the corner.

Big resource on J Craig Venter http://www.mahalo.com/Craig_Venter

Venter applies to patent living organisms:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6733797.stm

MIT Opensource DNA Project.

Venter has upset many scientists by applying to patent various natural living organisms his team have discovered. In contrast, MIT are co-ordinating an open source genome project. They have an online library of short sequences of DNA- sometimes called biobricks.

Researchers download the sequences then play around with them until they get something useful to happen. This might be the manufacture of a new kind of protein for cell metabolism or a sequence that adds useful structures to a cell.

The modified DNA is sent back to MIT who label what it can do and place the new element in their library. Anyone who wants to use the new sequence to do a particular job can incorporate it into their work or they can modify it further. Gradually it is hoped a library of code will be built up which workers can pick and choose from to create unique new organisms.

Useful products have already resulted from this project like bacteria that produce haemoglobin that can be freeze dried and reconstituted anywhere with water.

MIT Wetware Biobricks Open Source DNA Project

12 Base DNA and Steve Benner

In Florida, Professer of Chemistry, Steve Benner has made a new kind of DNA that uses 12 bases instead of 4 and it is already being manufactured in quantity. The 12 bases allow researchers to make DNA that is very specific in what kinds of proteins it will attach itself to. This is making the identification of viruses in the human blood stream very easy and has huge commercial potential.

Benner's ultimate goal is to synthesize a life form in his lab at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution that is similar to the earliest hypothesized life forms on earth. The sheer volume of money that his medical work is attracting from drug companies makes his ambitions seem realisable. He is a serious contender in the race to create new life.

Steve Benner and 12 Base DNA

Cell membranes do some pretty simple jobs and some very complicated jobs.

the simple jobs-

• They stop the contents of the cell from drifting apart
• They let small molecules, like water, enter and leave without problems.
• They stop large, potentially dangerous, molecules entering and large important molecules from leaving. This is done by having pores in the membrane that are just the right size.

The complicated jobs-

• they bring chemicals into the cell that the cell needs, actively selecting the right ones and actively transporting them through the membrane.
• during reproduction, they divide.

Teams across the world are racing to produce the first viable cell membrane using bi-lipid layers.  An announcement is expected any day.  Notable contenders:

• Protolife of Venice, Italy.
• Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School,

Organisms need to repair themselves. They need to grow and they need to reproduce. This is the business of cell metabolism. The DNA has all the information to do this. ATP will deliver the proton fuel. The ribosome is the place where stuff is made.

A ribosome is a tiny structure embedded in the cytoplasm of a cell. This is the chemicals factory. The DNA sends a message to make something via its close chemical cousin RNA. The ribosome provides the machinery to do it.

On the face of it, making a ribosome is an engineering nightmare- they are so incredibly intricate and so tiny that even electron microscopes struggle to make out the details. Then there is the precision required. One atom in the wrong place and the protein or enzyme that has been manufactured may not work.

But this is an area where engineering miracles have occurred. At a synthetic biology conference in Hong Kong in October 2008, George Church of Harvard Medical School and his collaborator Michael Jewett reported that they had solved one of the biggest assembly problems: putting together the most difficult working parts of a ribosome. Church believes that creating complete artificial ribosomes is now a pretty simple job.

This colossal feat of biological engineering has convinced many scientists that all kinds of biological structure can now be created from scratch- it is only a question of time, money and personnel.

Tetsuya Yomo at Osaka University in Japan has created a system similar to Church's but smaller and less capable of multitasking. Yomo's ribosomes only work for one type of RNA and one type of protein. They are already fully functional though - unlike Churches.

Food can be anything from sugar to simple chemicals like hydrogen sulfide. But for the energy in the food to be usable, it needs to come in the form of protons. Just as electrons provide the energy to fire up a light bulb or run a motor, so protons provide the energy for protein manufacture and all the other work that a cell needs to do in order to survive and prosper.

ATP
The protons are stored and released on demand by ATP- a complicated molecule that no one has even tried to make in a lab.

At present, researchers in Synbio are planning on adding ready-made ATP into the 'soup' their new organisms will float in. This would disqualify the organisms from being thought of as truly alive under Francis Collins' definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATP_synthase

Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School believes that nucleotides- the building blocks of DNA- are the key to firing up the metabolism of a cell. He hopes to get around the complexities of integrating cell metabolism by just adding a pile of nucleotides to an encouraging chemical soup in an artificial membrane. After that he hopes evolution will simply take over.

“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak says.

Bioinformatics is the application of mathematics and information science to biology.

According to the mathematicians and physicists in the field, bioinformantics and nanotechnology are the future for creating new life forms.

Only when someone can sit sit down at a computer and code DNA to do all the jobs that need to be done to control cell function, survive in a normal environment and reproduce, can it truly be said that science has created new life, they believe.

This will need huge advances in mathematics and might need to wait until the advent of quantum computing.

By a strange quirk, very powerful new computers may become a reality as a result of the work of synbio.

Biology and Quantum Computing:
Quantum

So Just How Soon Can be Expect To Create Life?

It might be tommorrow. It might be ten years from now. It might have already happened and you will read about it in the newspapers tommorrow.

One thing for sure: it is going to happen. The applications are too important and too commercially attractive for any country or company to ignore. Currently the US is the world leader in Synbio and some estimates suggest that by 2015, 20% of the chemical industry could be dependent on synthetic biology. This would make it worth 1.8 trillion dollars and a powerful player on the national stage.

So it is probably worth thinking about the consequences of this new technology.

Frankenstein organisms, new biological weapons, lab escapes that threaten the whole ecology of the earth- these are just a few of the anxieties surrounding synthetic biology.

Scientists have responded by saying that the new organisms will be too weak to survive outside of a laboratory. This may not always be the case.

Some of the fears the new science has aroused:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/22/comment.comment

http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi55.html