Authors@Google: David Deamer

Authors@Google: David Deamer: "

	Authors@Google: David Deamer Authors@Google presents "Synthetic Life: Can the Origin of Life Tape be Replayed?" by David Deamer "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos." Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley In Mary Shelley's classic tale, Dr. Victor Frankenstein assembled a human body from parts retrieved from cadavers. The novel, published nearly two hundred years ago, raised questions that we would now consider to fall within the realm of bioethics. If Dr. Frankenstein wanted to carry out his experiment today he would need to bring it to the attention of the IRB (Institutional Review Board) at his university who would doubtless reject it. And yet, a number of laboratories around the world are attempting to perform a reconstitution of life eerily similar to Frankenstein's dream, to fabricate something alive from a parts list, but on a microscopic scale. There is even a name for such science: synthetic biology. Steven Jay Gould once commented that evolutionary history is like a tape recording, and if we played it again the result would likely be very different. That is probably true for the complexities of evolution, but there may have been only one way for life to originate within the laws of chemistry and physics. In my talk I will briefly trace the history of attempts to fabricate artificial cells that increasingly are approaching the definition of living organisms. These efforts have not yet succeeded, but there is reason to believe that the goal <b>...</b>	From: AtGoogleTalks Views: 243 8 ratings
	Time: 56:47	More in Science & Technology

"