

Harvard Scientists’ Discovery Opens Door to Synthetic Life  - rogercosseboom
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aWNwdtOMONZ8&refer=home

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streety
I can see the advantage to expanding the pool of potential building blocks
with which we can make biomolecules. I can see how this would enable novel
biomolecules to be made. I can see why you would need custom ribosomes to
build these new biomolecules.

I can't see why you need to do this in artificial lifeforms rather than
E.coli.

If it is possible to do this in E.coli then the hard task, modifying the
ribosomes to support manufacturing these novel biomolecules, is still to come.

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smoody
“It might sound scary initially, but it would _almost_ be on life support,” he
said. “It would _probably_ be highly dependent on someone feeding it 30 or
more small molecules. It _wouldn’t be likely_ to escape into the environment
and run amok.”

"almost," "probably," "wouldn't be likely" -- those words don't exactly
inspire confidence.

Amazing breakthrough though.

~~~
streety
I think he could definitely have picked his phrases a little bit more
carefully.

"It might sound scary initially, but it would be on life support, entirely
dependent on us for survival" he said. "It would be highly dependent on
someone feeding it a variety, probably 30 or more, small molecules. It
wouldn’t be likely to escape into the environment and even if it did it would
be ill equipped to survive."

