
Spiegelman's Monster - ideonexus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegelman%27s_Monster
======
mfav
The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the
experiment, in my opinion.

We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka
abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment))
demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning)
spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary for the
life we see on Earth (caveat: Miller and Urey may have been wrong about early
Earth conditions).

Spiegelman tried to create something closer to what we'd consider living. His
"monster" was bootstrapped with an enzyme and some RNA (a simpler version of
DNA). The enzyme replicated the RNA many times over. After a "generation" of
replication, he'd move a sample of the RNA over to a new test tube. This would
be the father of a new generation. And so on, he repeated this process almost
100 times.

The interesting thing is that this extremely simple "monster" ended up
evolving in a way. By the end of a few generations, the RNA had adapted to its
environment and become much more efficient at replication. Other attempts at
the experiment have produced similar results. In effect, Spiegelman created a
barebones pseudo-living machine, and demonstrated it undergoing evolution in
the process.

~~~
brashrat
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a
particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.

~~~
mfav
The monster itself is just a strand of RNA.

The definition of living by most biologists wouldn't include a strand of
genetic material. Fire replicates in particular environments, as do viruses.
But we don't typically classify either as living.

I think the point you're getting at is that the distinction between living and
non-living is a bit arbitrary and meaningless. I agree.

~~~
adrianN
Fire and viruses have an important difference though, when fire replicates,
its children don't inherit anything. A better example would be crystals as
their structure influences crystals they seed.

~~~
tambourine_man
Neither fire nor crystals mutate. That's the thing.

A crystals arrangement of its microscopic structure will always be the same,
as will the oxidation reaction in fire.

A virus undergoes darwinian evolution and will adapt to its environment

~~~
adrianN
Crystals actually do mutate, the crystallization process is not perfect and
introduces defects.

~~~
dekhn
that's not what mutation means.

~~~
drdeca
I thought mutate just meant change?

~~~
dekhn
in biology, mutate has a very specific meaning, and it does not include the
formation of imperfect crystals. That area has its own set of terminology.

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userbinator
Interesting that it's the informational equivalent of 109 bytes, which is
around the same order of magnitude as some of the earliest computer viruses
that did nothing but replicate.

~~~
nenreme
1 nucleotide = 2 bits,

218 nucleotides = 436 bits = 54.5 bytes

~~~
bbrizzi
Still bigger than a fork bomb !

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sillysaurus3
Let's make DNAduino and start doing this kind of thing at home. Best science
project.

I wonder what the current state of the art of homemade bioexperimentation is.

~~~
cjhveal
For those who are interested in this space, I'd strongly recommend first
looking at options outside of your home.

If you're in the bay area, here's a hacker/maker space for biology:

[http://biocurious.org/](http://biocurious.org/)

If you're not, you could investigate joining an iGEM team. It's an annual
synthetic biology competition, where competitors engineer biological
"machines" and are encouraged to factor their work into standard, reusable
biological components, called BioBricks (see:
[http://parts.igem.org/Catalog](http://parts.igem.org/Catalog)). I
participated for some time in college, and it was really exciting and I was
able to contribute via mathematical/in silica modeling with only a handful of
undergraduate biology courses under my belt.

If you're set on your own biohacking space, you're going to need to get some
equipment. A non-exhaustive list of what you'll likely need in no particular
order, are: reaction vessels, pipettes + tips, plates + medium, incubators,
autoclave, fridge/freezer, restriction enzymes & ligase, electrophoresis
chamber + gel, PCR machine + polymerase, centrifuge, microscope, and of
course, some e. coli.

Please do your research and if you don't have lab experience or are uncertain
about something, find someone who has worked in a lab to help you. Most of
this stuff isn't as scary as it seems, but if you mishandle the
equipment&chemicals, you can do real damage, to yourself, to property, and to
the environment. It's not something you should "move fast and break things"
with.

~~~
teod
For those in NYC:

[http://genspace.org/](http://genspace.org/)

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bjackman
Amazing! Douglas Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach" introduces a formal
system called Typogenetics designed to resemble the system of RNA and DNA and
its replication. He poses the question of the shortest psuedo-RNA chain that
can self-replicate. He doesn't provide a solution in the book but plenty have
been found online. I had no idea there was also a solution for the _real
thing_!

