John
> Interesting BBC science article.
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_620000/620847.stm
>
>
> The breakthrough that is still necessary to do this is to know how to
> jumpstart the genome
>
I think this is a weakness of the DNA approach to constructing life, though,
for the purposes of creating bacteria-to-order in the future, it is probably
okay.
I doubt that life originated as DNA-based, or even RNA-based. In this
respect I agree with critics who say that it's just too improbable to get a
working organism that way. My guess (with Stuart Kauffman) is that life
originated as some sort of loose confederation of molecules that served, as
a group, to reproduce the components of the confederation. Selection for
stability and reproductive capacity could begin at this level (or even
lower, at the level of a single auto-catalyzing simple molecule), leading
eventually to "mini-cells" (cell-like structures with a near-minimum of
molecular "machinery," vastly simpler than any cells we know of today). The
rest is history. :-)
-- Chris
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