…and this is a 
Edge hosted an amazing session that described the looming future of biology — this is for the real futurists. It featured George Church and Craig Venter talking about synthetic genomics — how we're building new organisms right now and with presentiments for radical prospects in the future.
Brace yourself. There are six hours of video there; I've only started wading into it, but what I've seen so far also looks like a lot of material that will be very useful for inspiring students about the future of their field. There is also a downloadable book (which is a dead link right now, but I'm sure will be fixed soon) if you don't want to watch the talks…but the talks are pretty darned good. Somehow, I'm going to have to make time to soak these up. Here's the overview of the six sessions:
Dreams & Nightmares
Overview, safety/security/policy, nanotechnology, molecular manufacturingSmaller than life
What is life, origins, in vitro synthetic life, mirror life, computing and DNA, computing with DNAEngineering microbes
Bio-petrochemicals & pharmaceuticals, accelerated lab evolutionEngineering humans
Electronic-biological interfaces, bioengineered personal stem cells, humanized mice, bringing back extinct speciesThe sorceror
The diversity of life, constructing life, from Darwin to new fuelsThe near future, big questions
Terraforming earth, creating extraterrestrials, the singularity, human nature
There goes your weekend.
Life Science
Comments
Posted by: llewelly | July 31, 2009 10:17 AM
What!!! Delving into THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW, again?? You biologists are incorrigible. Soon you'll commit the ultimate blasphemy: providing a scientific explanation for human emotions such as compassion, love of music, or hate. Probably you should all go to hell, for explaining things.
Posted by: Bodach | July 31, 2009 10:27 AM
AAAGH! Human animal hybrids! Blasphemy! & etc.
Posted by: Didac | July 31, 2009 10:28 AM
Yeah, and now than we are at reach to obtain the first artificial genome, someone will add: "But an artificial genome is not exactly the same as artificial life". That is tricky because it is true. But what's exactly artificial life? There was a time when people thought that artificial life was no more and no less than to reproduce in the lab the origin of life (you know from the soup of Urey-Miller to Oparin's coacervates). That's very far from our reach, by now. However, when people think nowadays on "artificial life" they point very often to "artificial life" in silicion (i.e. computer-simulated life).
In 1823 (not the last Thursday, indeed) Wohler managed to synthetize urea from non-organic compounds (carbon dioxide and ammonia). In those time, somebody could add: "Well done, Wohler. But can you synthetize urea from nothing?".
Posted by: Steve LaBonne
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July 31, 2009 10:38 AM
I hope the "nightmares" discussion didn't get too silly. I'm old enough to remember the whole recombinant DNA / Asilomar / P3 lab fiasco, and it would be a damn shame to repeat it.
Posted by: genecutter | July 31, 2009 10:38 AM
Hot damn! Screw the yard work this weekend, this is more important.
Posted by: Pascalle
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July 31, 2009 10:42 AM
I'm starting my ba in science on the field of nature and enviromental studies soon, especially that last part will be very interesting for me.
thank you so much for posting all of that PZ.. there goes my weekend ;)
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | July 31, 2009 10:55 AM
Slightly off topic: Does anyone agree with me that they'd like to buy Craig Venter a round of beers and then bring up the name "Francis Collins" in the conversation? I'd pay admission to hear what he has to say about the NIH appointment.
Posted by: Paul Lundgren | July 31, 2009 11:05 AM
@Didac:
You could get into some fairly involved discussions on the topic, "What's life?" There is, as I understand it, some debate among those researching the potential of life on other planets for a commonly-agreed-upon definition, in order to account for possible differences in the origin of extraterrestrial life.Apologies if this is off topic, but this sort of philosophical stuff is fascinating to me.
Dr. Myers, thanks for the links. I know how I'm going to blow off cleaning my home this weekend. Have fun in Cincinnati.
Posted by: Ultima thule | July 31, 2009 11:22 AM
Envy me! I just finished my finals! I have all the weekend to watch those videos!!!
Btw, Last UK wired magazine has a very cool article about "Designing babies"
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | July 31, 2009 11:26 AM
Dude, I am surprised that you are credulously falling for this synthetic biology "creating new organisms" hype.
To the extent that we are, indeed, "creating new organisms", we have been doing so for millenia, starting with the breeding and domestication of plants and animals, and continuing with the more advanced techniques we now have for directly altering the genetic material of organisms. However, shills like Venter are purposefully conflating this uncontroversial sense of "creating new organisms" with the sense in which one buys a fuckton of chemicals from Sigma and "creates new organisms" in the lab.
What we currently have the capability of doing is a fucktillion times closer to the former than the latter.
Posted by: ERV | July 31, 2009 11:40 AM
Yeah, but dont forget what we were taught in the late 90s/early 2000s-- Francis Collins is a brilliant breath-taking innovator, while Craig Venter is just some asshole.
Posted by: Darren Garrison | July 31, 2009 11:42 AM
I just want to know when I can buy one of those glow-in-the-dark cats.
Posted by: raven | July 31, 2009 11:43 AM
Question for anyone who knows. Craig Venter a year or two ago, reported the synthesis de novo of a mycoplasma genome and cloned it in yeast. He also has developed a method to transfect whole genomes into mycoplasma.
From here, it should be a few weeks to "create a synthetic life form" as proof of principle.
Has it happened yet? Haven't heard which leads me to believe it hasn't. That it hasn't implies that they tried a bunch of times and it didn't work. That's research, things always take longer and cost more than you expect.
Anyone know or heard what is going on here?
Posted by: raven | July 31, 2009 11:53 AM
A few years, on anti-creationism web sites, the creos would always have one of their snappy dumb comments.
"If you biologists are so smart, why can't you create life. {Insert god babble and death threats here}.
They don't do it anymore. We've already synthetically created life forms. Polio virus de novo. The phoenix retrovirus. The latter was extinct for who knows how many megayears. The human genome is filled with retrovirus wreckage from age old battles. Someone took the various defective sequences and reconstructed the original virus.
This is creating life and also bringing the dead back to life. Take that fundie cultists. Who of course, ignored it and moved the goal posts. Now they claim that we are wrong because no one has created a new universe. Which is good really, the first human caused Big Bang would be the last of us.
Science marches on while some religions are still repeating bronze age mythology and trying to pretend it is real.
Posted by: Doc Bill | July 31, 2009 11:56 AM
Considering how difficult it was in the mid-70's when I was a grad student to analyze peptide fragments (we were just starting to use GC-MS and analyze the spectra with programs written in FORTRAN!) we've come a long way, baby.
Programming microorganisms in a few years will be like programming computers in my day. Check out what's being done today in Drew Endy's lab.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFxKyk_uDFg&feature=fvst
I don't know about you, but I think that putting a genetic "subroutine" into an organism and have it execute is hot stuff. Seriously, the person who can make cat turds smell like bananas is going to be the next Bill Gates.
This isn't Jetsons, Gravity Belt future. This is the next decade.
Posted by: J | July 31, 2009 12:22 PM
*nanotechnology, molecular manufacturing*
ARRRRRRGH!!!
Get it through your thick, stupid skulls: Nanotech has NOTHING TO DO WITH TINY. FUCKING. ROBOTS! No, we will NOT soon be "building things from the molecules up".
There is something called nanoscience being done in various labs (like, for example, my wife's
Here, here's the actual science being done there and in places like it). Just boring ol' polymer assemblage. Nothing like nanobots are in the offing. It's totally worth getting excited about: Who wouldn't like some fresh new capillaries at, say, age 65 or 70? But no, no tiny robots. None at all.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | July 31, 2009 12:25 PM
... George Church ... Somehow, I'm going to have to make time ...
There's so much low-hanging fruit around this blog that sometimes even a scavenger like myself can be satisfied by rolling over and pointing.
Posted by: «bønez_brigade»
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July 31, 2009 12:29 PM
"Terraforming earth"
Erm...
Posted by: Travis | July 31, 2009 12:52 PM
Gee, you are right, there does go my weekend. I guess I'll have to try to blog about them as well.
Posted by: Gruesome Rob | July 31, 2009 12:55 PM
Yeah, the Sahara is so verdant and hospitable to life that it doesn't need changes :-P
Posted by: Phaedrus | July 31, 2009 1:12 PM
I noticed immediately that there were no representatives from the "faith" community. No doubt they will be throwing stones at this research, yet here is an opportunity to understand and participate in this subject and they're conspicuously absent.
Posted by: Chuck | July 31, 2009 1:25 PM
While protein engineering and genomic programming sound really cool, and synthetic biology is cool in that it is smooth route to the construction of biological machines after design, there is nothing really earthshattering about the concept of synthetic biology itself. Creating new life? Not really. We are essentially copying life. And transforming a bacterial cell with a synthesized genome is no different, in principle, from transformation with a plasmid. It is not "creating life". There wouldn't really be any point in constructing a whole bacterial cell from scratch, anyway, although - again - it is, in principle, possible to do so.
I look forward to watching the whole show. I do some protein engineering in my graduate work. Maybe I'll learn a few things.
Posted by: Chuck | July 31, 2009 1:29 PM
Chemistry already did nanotech, like, 3.5-3.7 billion years ago. Proteins are little molecular robots, and ribosomes are little molecular computers, and chromosomes are little molecular hard drives.
Posted by: Didac | July 31, 2009 1:29 PM
Paul (#7): artificial life is more or less akin to simulation. Artificial life are the other lives we "create", and simulation are the other realities we "simulate". As Sartre said, "l'infern sont les autres". Artificial and natural are social constructs about the acceptable limits of ourselves. And for the definition of life... uf. Miquel Bauçà said that "the only two problems are existence and intelligence, which made possible to perceive both of them". Existence is a prerequisite for life, and life is a prerequisite for intelligence. However, most living beings in Earth are not intelligent beings, and most things in universe are not living beings.
Posted by: Barbarian | July 31, 2009 1:53 PM
"There is also a downloadable book (which is a dead link right now, but I'm sure will be fixed soon)"
This link seems to work:
http://edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf
(poking around in the site structure is often helpful)
Posted by: Collin the Electrician | July 31, 2009 2:00 PM
Granted I barely made it through my first year of College and my science backround rivals that of a 7th grader, I find this video very captivating and the field itself interesting. It would be nice if they offered it on DVD. I'm sure a few select of my fellow party animal friends would sit down and enjoy it as much as I did. I plan on going back to college, and this entire field has captured an interest I thought I'd never have for anything academically.
Posted by: Pascalle
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July 31, 2009 2:01 PM
Definately. It's something i'm very interested in. Not so much the sahara, but how to save our oxygen. If you thought cutting the trees was bad, imagine what the plastic soup is doing to the plankton life just under the surface of the ocean. It needs direct sunlight for its photosynteses, which is harder when there's a dirty layer of plastic inbetween.
Wouldn't it be great if that plankton could be engineerd to be able to use that plastic as nourishment and produce it's oxygen from that?
On another note.
I just watched part 1 and it's a lot to take in. I guess i have to look up stuff about DNA, or maybe watch it a second time before i look at more.
Posted by: Fred The Hun | July 31, 2009 4:02 PM
Well, we can't all be galavanting at Ken Ham's museum, ya know!
So this is a nice consolation prize. Only problem is I *WAS* supposed to paint my girlfriend's house this weekend....
Posted by: Nap | July 31, 2009 4:07 PM
Devil take you all! I shall lose whatever shred of a social life I had!
/drama
Posted by: Diego | July 31, 2009 6:02 PM
Well, at least it's supposed to be rainy this weekend so I won't be missing out on outdoor adventure time. ;)
Posted by: George | July 31, 2009 7:49 PM
I am building my budget for furry development.
When no one is looking, I take the money from the collection plate, and now I can put it to good purpose!
Posted by: steveL | August 1, 2009 12:13 AM
I don't think terraforming will ever be possible because of chaotic dynamics--small changes could have large unpredictable and unwanted side effects. Like how we're veneriforming our own planet without really wanting to.
How come I can't log in to typepad? I get a screenful of perl error messages when I try. Is it just me?
Posted by: Pikemann Urge | August 1, 2009 2:17 AM
I was wondering what happened to computing with DNA. Good to see it's alive and kicking.
Posted by: Samuel | August 1, 2009 12:56 PM
Is it available on YouTube or in a form of files which I can download instead of just watching it on the web page? My Firefox plugin for downloading streaming media, "Fast Video Download", doesn't work with these videos.
Posted by: Rik G | August 1, 2009 4:11 PM
It looks like I'll be saving money on video rentals for a while!
This series made me think of a post from last November in which you solicited suggestions for lists of essential and commercially viable science books that bookstores ought to stock.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/11/what_science_books_ought_a_boo.php#more
You mentioned that you would compile those lists into a downloadable .pdf file, but I searched about four months worth of the archives and couldn't find it. Did that project get lost in the shuffle, or did I miss the posting? There were hundreds of interesting suggestions, but I'd still love to see the consolidated list if it's available somewhere....