Synthetic Life

Synthetic biology promises to enable cheap, lifesaving new drugs to treat the 350-500 million people who suffer from malaria, and to create innovative biofuels that can help solve the world's energy problems. But the science and its applications are raising questions: Are synthetic biologists playing God?

Bay Area futurists and their fans are gathering Saturday in a coming-of-age celebration for the fledgling field of synthetic biology, which builds living entities from lifeless chemicals.

Synthetic biology is being touted by scientists and venture capitalists as "the next big thing." Researchers claim to be on the brink of creating artificial life in a laboratory and making the world's first synthetic microbes. The first blockbuster synbio drug—an affordable cure for malaria—is expected on the market by 2010. And a whole new biofuels industry spawned by synthetic biologists that promises to conquer the globe's energy problems seems just around the corner.

Researchers at Yale University have created a blueprint for artificial cells that are more powerful and efficient than the natural cells they mimic and could one day be used to power tiny medical implants.

Spore is a multi-genre "massively single-player online game" by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.

This paper describes a new class of DNA-like oligomers made exclusively of nonnatural, stable C-nucleosides.

Researchers at The University of Nottingham have taken some important first steps to creating a synthetic copycat of a living cell, a leading science journal reports.

"Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" Craig Venter asks. His answer is "yes" -- and pretty soon. He walks through his latest research and promises that we’ll soon be able to build and boot up a synthetic chromosome.

A team of Penn State researchers has developed a simple artificial cell with which to investigate the organization and function of two of the most basic cell components: the cell membrane and the cytoplasm--the gelatinous fluid that surrounds the structures in living cells.

An "artificial cell" capable of synthesising genes and making them into proteins has been developed by researchers in the US. The postage stamp-sized machine able to make and express its own genes offers a fast and cheap new way of making "designer" proteins not found in nature. It could ultimately help scientists test how individual patients will react to specific drugs.

Four-year-old Eddie might behave like a typical young boy. Outside of the Second Life virtual world, however, he is anything but.

Abstract: This philosophical paper tries to tackle the question of what could be the ultimate future of ALife from a cosmic viewpoint. We first argue that the natural direction of ALife is a simulation of an entire universe.

A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working to change engineer video game characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behavior of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world, according to the team.

If you've watched "The Lord of the Rings" or many other visual effects-driven Hollywood films, you have seen Massive Software's 3-D animation software at work.

By Terren Suydam

Artificial Intelligence (AI), the idea that we might someday create something as smart or smarter than we are, is a breathtaking possibility. The emergence of such an AI might well be as important to the story of mankind as making contact with intelligent aliens. Some of our most popular books and movies have vividly depicted our hopes and fears surrounding the possibility that machines could achieve conscious independence from us.