Should we be worried about this artificial life development reported in the journal Science recently? A US science institute has created artificial life. It’s only a chromosome but has the potential to become cellular life. Mycoplasma genitalium, has the smallest known genome of any truly living organism, with 485 working genes.
the team at the non-profit J. Craig Venter Institute in Maryland has been working for years to try to build M. genitalium from scratch.
Ventor has noble aims: to make synthetic microorganisms that could be used for producing biofuels, cleaning up toxic waste or pulling excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The problem lies with the knowledge that once released life has a habit of doing its own thing. It mutates under natural radiation from the sun and rocks and so become less harmless than intended. There are some nasty people and governments around who might think ill-advisedly that their aims may be furthered by employing artificial microbes to reverse pollution clean ups. Maybe to add poisons into the atmosphere and oceans. You might think that there are already plenty of natural nasties out there, and you’d be right. It’s always amused me that food companies like to add the word ‘Natural’ to packaging as if everything in Nature is good for us. Have they heard of Poison Ivy, Deadly Nightshade, Manure? Would you want to eat those in your next snack bar because its labelled as Natural? Nor me!
So maybe a few more tiny organisms in the environment won’t matter, especially if they really do help clean up after us. On the other hand there have been plenty of science fiction stories where such artificial nanotechniks have gone berserk and ate the hands that made them. It could be that homo sapiens end up being replaced by Mycoplasma genitalium or their cousins in the future. I wonder if they’ll read science fiction?
Well I guess we are not the same creatures that walked the earth millions of years ago. Who can say how humans will develop even without the new sciences — that is, if they don’t kill each other off first.
I can’t say about poison ivy as having nothing good about it, but isn’t deadly nightshade used in certain medicines? Manure is used to cultivate the ground and it is likely that for very many years traces of it have been eaten on fruit and veg. Dogs often eat it — the vet told me that there are traces of vitamins and minerals in sheep poo. (Our dog, when we were not watching, enjoyed other dog’s poo too — perhaps the provider of the poo had been fed on tastier meat!)
And do you know, dung (nor sure of which animal – possible ox) was used for medical purposes back in Roman times? For one thing, it was stuffed up a woman’s vagina to alleviate certain medical problems — or so I read.