Here are the major excerpts from the article:
[i]Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are close to creating an organism completely different from any life on Earth.
They have all the building blocks ready and are hoping in the next few years to create a new organism 10 million times smaller than the smallest bacteria, they say in an article released today in the journal Science.
“If we can build creatures like this from scratch, we can design them to do things we’ve never seen in nature,” said Steen Rasmussen, a scientist on the project. “They could be the building blocks for self-repairing systems, but we could also design them with metabolisms not found in nature. We could make them eat the worst contaminants out there, then die when they run out of food.”
These tiny critters could lead to a new field of technology that allows all sorts of things - clothing, computer components, maybe even your car - to fix themselves, Rasmussen said.[/i]
[i]The scientists would build the organism by combining a synthetic DNA - called PNA, for lipophilic peptide nucleic acid - with a simple metabolism and a cell-like container to hold the material.
Such creatures could be released onto an oil spill in the ocean. They’d eat all the oil from the spill, breaking it down into harmless components, then die off as soon as the spill was gone. Other organisms could be designed to only eat deadly viruses, Rasmussen said.[/i]
[i]“Of course, there are a lot of moral issues surrounding the idea of living systems,” Rasmussen said. “Should we treat them a certain way? We don’t have moral issues when we give antibiotics to kill a disease. Still, there are serious issues about how do we use a technology like this. It’s like atomic technology - there are good ways and bad ways to use it. We just have to be careful.”
Some of the potential problems are very serious. If the tiny creatures were harmful or toxic to humans and able to reproduce themselves, it could cause large-scale damage, Bedau said.
“Also if they’re alive and can evolve, the consequences are impossible to predict,” Bedau said. “Still, we need to work on this because other countries are working on it. We need to research it so if there is a problem elsewhere we know how to deal with it. Also, by working on it we’ll learn how to control it and contain it.”
Right now, there are no regulations preventing or monitoring the creation of artificial life. That is something that should be worked out before scientists actually create their first living cell, Bedau said.
“There may be clouds on the horizon but this technology also has the potential to open a fantastic door to all kinds of new possibilities,” Bedau said. “We’ll be making life. On a pure scientific level, that means we’ll have a very deep understanding of what life actually is. In a more practical vein, life has very interesting and powerful properties. It’s the only thing that can reproduce and repair itself.”[/i]
Source: abqtrib.com/archives/news04/ … life.shtml
What are your opinions about this upcoming scientific revolution? Is mankind really allowed to play God? Or are there some paths we better leave aside when exploring the possibilities of our scientific knowledge?
Personally I think this is just another example of the incredible arrogance of some scientists. They think they’re allowed to do anything, because they have the tools available. They probably think the moral issues will solve itself in time, when people get used to the idea (same thing happened with the cloning of animals, abortion, GMO’s,…), and eventually they can experiment as much as they like. Simply because man has an inherent sense of curiousity to explore the world around him, and woe betide the person who tries to stop this evolution of exploring! At least, this is the impression I get when I look around me (all my science teachers think like that). But I think this view is wrong. Instead of fanatically trying to get further and further, scientists should learn to accept life as it is. They should learn to look at life and experience its beauty instead of seeing only chemical reactions of molecules. A pure scientific view upon the world seems so flat and hollow. And dangerous too if you think about it. The image of a scientific hermit, locked up in his laboratory, playing God on his test animals appears in my mind. If only they’re able to see the depth of life on a more subjective, based-upon-experience-instead-of-objective-evidence way, they might realize that it’s unnecessary to develop science infinitely in every aspect. Luckily the experience of the infinite depth and beauty of life can never be translated into a scientific theory of interacting chemicals 
Post your thoughts
We shouldn’t mess with nature, regardless of our curiosity to explore or the many positive effects. If we didn’t mess with nature in the first place, we wouldn’t have to deal with dangerous chemicals in the environment such as pollution, nuclear waste and oil so there wouldn’t be any reason to fabricate articificial bacteria to clean up the mess we caused. But I guess there first needs to happen a big accident before people reconsider what they’re doing and think about the possible consequences of their actions (look at Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Prestige, the thalidomide tragedy in the 60’s, Hiroshima, the ongoing disaster at Mayak,…). Those examples were only disaster on a more or less local scale. Other more worldly and more indirect examples are the ozon depletion, greenhouse effect, the accelerated extinction of animals/plants,… Here with the upcoming revolution, the possible dangers can also extend to the whole world (same thing is actually true for the dangers of nanotechnology). Ofcourse scientists will never say “it’s too dangerous to experiment on this, so we won’t explore this path”. That would go against their code of scientific development and exploration.