Creating new life- ethical implications

[Murdoch]

First off... , and

I use PCR, cloning and this stuff everyday. Here goes:

Welsh: There is no need for a new set of base pairs. This is pure hubris on the part of scientists. Whereas the project to create the simplest organism possible (by deleting genes one at a time until they cannot delete anymore) is has scientific uses. Dispelling the intelligent design fucktards being one. An organism that utilizes adenine, cytosine guanine, thymine and this new one would be evolutionarily unnecessary, requiring more energy than necessary to replicate. All you need is four bases that pair A-T and C-G because:

Since such organisms (simple yeasts or bacteria) would carry a brand-new genetic code, they would in effect be new life forms. Organisms with more than the standard two base pairs would be able to make more than the standard 20 amino acids. Thus, such organisms could make novel, unnatural proteins.

This is bullshit. The genetic code is degenerate. A,T,C and G group into triplets called codons, which ribosomes use to assemble proteins. Four bases in any of three positions equal 64 possible combinations, theoretically encoding 62 separate amino acids including the start and stop codon. As it stands multiple codon encode the same amino acid, making the code degenerate.

If they wanted to they'd just reprogram the tRNA and ribosomes to use a currently degenerate codon to encode a new amino acid. BUT in doing so (by any means) you'd still need to be able to synthesize the amino acid metabolically, and have it recognized as self by the immune system, not be toxic, and innumerable other idiosyncratic things.

Mine is pretty loose and describes anything from single-cell organisms to humans, back to virusses and even plants.

My working definition is anything that encodes its own replication machinery, not hijacking other organisms. So viruses are out, as in non-living. But I respect yours.

I just hope that scientists find a way of solving the problem with natural DNA replication: everytime the RNA copies the DNA,

DNA is copied into DNA during replication, not DNA to RNA.

fragments from both ends are lost (no, don't start any jokes about NO CARRIER or CRC errors, please) and thus the resulting NMA copy is actually shorter than the previous ones and thus the cell becomes weaker and more vulnerable to mutation (cancer) and to die unexpectedly (apoptosis).

Apoptosis, sort of. Cancer no. Apoptosis is programmed cell death. Its what happens to the tail we all have in the womb; it is programmed to 'die'.

Cancer cells don't have this problem because they use thelomerase (an enzyme that allows it to recover the lost thelomeres (the little fragments that are lost)). I want to be im-fucking-mortal...and not just to wield a katana and live on a boat in France.

Telomeres are stretches of repetitive DNA at the 3' end of the chromosomes of eukaryotes (animals and plants, not bacteria) that are shortened every cell division due to the vagarities of molecular biology and replication. Only stem cells retain their totipotence (ability to divide indefinitely). If all cells could do this they would already have one of the major ingredients of cancer-indefinite replication. Feel good that not all your cells could do this because you'd have died long ago. But in principle you're right about immortaility. Being able to control and extend cell division via telomeres is a cornerstone of life-extension research.

A lot of things can go wrong when one is dealing with the transcriping process. Heck, take out all the potential pitfalls, such as possibility of mutations or aptosises. Just the simple act of PCR is unpredicable at best. Technically, it's the most mundane procedure right now, since the hard part is to read the test results. But anything can and do go wrong during this process.

That's because PCR doesn't utilize many of the natural DNA replication mechanisms in cells.

There is no complicated incubation procedure(in the old days, you would have to do this by hand, a la protein analysis), no mystical arts of the RNA transcriptease, no insertion, everything is top of the line and everyone is properly trained. So what do we still get? Most likely to be 95% accurate at best.

Indeed. PCR is mundane and straightforward. 95% fidelity is not. In a lab, with the appropriate polymerase fidelity can be upwards of 1 mutation every 20,000 bases. What kind of ghetto pol are you using!