Baby, it's cold outside.
I’ve been doing some work recently on synthetic biology – the discipline that attempts to recreate life artificially in the lab from non-living materials. In principle, this should be fairly easy: after all, a living organism is just a hodge-podge of chemicals. And recent advances have demonstrated that creating life in the lab is almost as easy as expected. In fact, it’s possible to generate a basic living entity from the kinds of odds and ends that one might find lying around any reasonably well-equipped scientific establishment.

That is to say, you can perform a biological bodge-job.

I wouldn’t recommend it, though – and the project with which I was associated should serve as a warning. Knowing what ought to be possible, planning was sacrificed on the altar of excitement and basic safety procedures sacrificed on the altar of scientific curiosity. Life was there, being made in the lab – but corners were cut, and much too little attention was paid to what’d happen if things went wrong and quarantine failed.

Inevitably, because this was a bodge-job, quarantine did fail. Things went very, very wrong, and did so very, very quickly. There was a couple of deaths.

And that’s why you found me near the North Pole, chasing a seven-foot-tall artificial life form.

Your pal
Victor.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 14 Mar 2011, 15:38, 3 replies)

"...I have in me capacity for love so great, or hate so, that very few could comprehend it. And if I cannot have one, I will indulge the other"
One of my favourite quotes.
( MatJ LOOK, Mon 14 Mar 2011, 17:37, closed)

It is rather powerful.
I seem to remember Henry Rollins making a similar point in an interview for Select in about 1997/8. Except that he was a lot shoutier about it.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 14 Mar 2011, 21:37, closed)

Abbie
Abbie-normal
(therealche, Wed 16 Mar 2011, 18:37, closed)