I’m afraid the webpage in question is only open by subscription, but this week’s Nature has a report from some researchers who used SELEX to create a ribozyme which can copy RNA 14-mers.
Translation:
Scientists now believe that life originated from molecules of RNA, which can both encode information and carry out chemical reactions. By mixing a bunch of random RNAs together, copying them with a copying enzyme that is not 100% perfect (and therefore introduces mutations,) and selecting for RNAs with the desired properties, a group of scientists have created an RNA molecule which can copy other RNA molecules, if they are <=14 nucleotides long. Unfortunately the enzyme is much longer than that, and thus cannot self-replicate, but it looks like only minor tweaking might be needed.
If the minor tweaking works out, they will have created a self-replicating RNA molecule, and that would add a lot of support to the idea that a self-replicating RNA molecule was the ancestor of all life.
Fascinating. The origin of life is one of the handful of scientific mysteries we have left. It’s great to see mankind discovering so much information about our origins. To think that a century ago electricity was a novelty!
Any creationists care to jump in and comment that this is all bunk, and that the true story of how we got here is contained in a 3,000 year old book of Middle Eastern mythology?
What, IYO, are the others? I was going to list a few, but it seems like there’s always been a limited list of the really, really deep questions:
How did the universe begin?
What is life? (Answered in enough detail to satisfy philosophers, although I imagine big surprises are ahead in terms of the details of gene regulation in metazoans. The creation of artificial life is, IMO, one of the big research projects we should be working on now. There are even sound commercial/industrial reasons to create life from nonliving components!)
Theory of Everything, which we’ve arguably been working on ever since we were old enough to ask questions.
What causes consciousness? The current status of this is the opposite of #2. The core question is a complete puzzle, but many intriguing details have been revealed to us.
How did life originate? We’ve made radical progress in the last couple of decades. As with developmental biology, at least we now know what questions to ask!
Are we alone in the universe?
Can you name some more?
I should also point out that some of the deep questions didn’t occur to us until we were ready to ask them. Think of the implications of Godel’s Theorem, for example.
You know, I have a distinct memory of myself as a little kid, about 5 years old, talking to my friends about the year 2001 as we were marched from school building A to school building B. We were calculating how old we would be in 2001. While we don’t have manned missions to Jupiter, let me summarize my past week:
Read 3 papers on the origin of life.
Read a brief article in Nature on plans for various new neutrino observatories. Can you believe it? Neutrino observatories! When I was a kid, I thought radio telescopes were hot stuff!
Got copies of some genetic “software” from a collaborator, and did minor rewriting of it. (To be precise, I designed some primers for site-directed mutagenesis of some plasmids.)
Within the last couple of months I did work which required the use of antimatter (positrons, to be exact.)
Opus, all the scientists proved is that they can create life themselves by mixing RNA’s. They have not proven that RNA’s can mix totally by themselves to create life, without any minor or major tweaking from an outside source.
Actually, capacitor, you’ve gotten it more or less completely wrong. The scientists haven’t created life, and they haven’t even claimed that they did. What they have done is to come a step closer to demonstrating that an RNA molecule or an assemblage of RNA molecules can have the property of self-replication.
I find your misstatement interesting, though. It used to be that most people maintained that only God can create life, period. Now it seems to have generally been downgraded to the claim that intelligence, human or divine, is needed to create life.
Ben, I did not say that they can do it now. The structures needed to sustain life as we know it are very complex even on the microscopic scale. But they admit that with a little tweaking, they can make a self-replicating enzyme. That is the first basis of life, making more of oneself.
Besides, I don’t think God has exclusive domain in creating life on Earth. After all, he did command us to “be fruitful and multiply”.
Why the quotes around the word life? You do realize we’re talking about biological entities here, don’t you? We’re not discussing how God created souls or spirits. (Libertarian believes that atoms aren’t alive, only souls (or spirits) are.)
Incidentally, why do creationists find it so impossibly hard to understand SELEX? I tried to explain it at the Pizza Parlor, only to have ghoti launch an all-out attack on it in which he completely misunderstood virtually everything, even after I corrected him several times. After arguing at length that SELEX was impossible, he finally triumphantly declared that the success of SELEX was exactly the sort of thing you’d predict if Intelligent Design were true. And it wasn’t just him- all the other creationists (mythbuster, for example) had no understanding of my explanation at all, while the few evolutionists present found it trivially easy to understand.