Any mad, cackling scientist created something in a test tube that is, or could be debates as, alive?
I remember at the end of the 90’s they said it was a matter of a couple years but they usually are too optimistic on these timelines…
Sort of. From the New York Times of May 20, 2010, “The genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has taken another step in his quest to create synthetic life, by synthesizing an entire bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell.”
To expand on this - yes, sort of. The trick here is that we used the existing machinery of a living cell and just replaced the “programming”. That word, machinery - I’m going to use it a lot.
Consider the cell as a self-modifying, self-repairing machine. It has a spaceframe, hull and internal framework (cell membrane, cell wall, and cytoskeleton, respectively). It has powerplants and a fuel processors (ATP synthases and core metabolism). It has chemical plants, sensors, repair systems, control systems, propulsion systems, the works. Most importantly, it can make new parts for itself when old ones wear out, or when its control program decides that it now needs some new capability that it didn’t before.
Right now, we have no way of building all of these parts from scratch. Oh, we can commandeer other cells to build the parts we want - that’s what genetic engineering is. What that amounts to is adding an additional little subprogram that tells the system responsible for building additional parts to build one or two more when it receives some signal. That’s pretty easy, kids can do it. What the Venter team did was they took an existing machine, carefully stripped out most of the hard disks in its main “computer”, and replaced them with their own, which they made from scratch. Over time, the machine will be making new parts for itself, fixing broken ones, and it’ll be making them according to Venter’s program, not its original one. So over time, the old pieces will be replaced with new pieces, until eventually, it’ll be a mostly-new machine.
Mostly. See, we don’t fully know how all the parts fit together yet. And even if we did, we don’t have the synthetic capacity to put together such a complex machine. So we use all sorts of tricks. This is a step in the right direction, don’t get me wrong, but Venter was always big on self-promotion. This is definitely a cool thing, but it’s not exactly Synthetic! Life! 111!1eleven.
It is fair to note that the set of instructions (DNA) that Venter and his team assembled was a (barely modified) copy of the natural bacterial DNA of a related cell. Synthetically assembling that much DNA and inserting it into a new cell is a major achievement, because now sections of that DNA can be edited (in a text editor) and tested (debugged) in live cells to determine the effects.
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Wow! Is that available in an off-the-shelf kit yet? 
Does the Furby count?
heh. You’re joking, but the reality is yes, its available “off the shelf”.
We routinely use commercial gene synthesis in our research - the same thing Venter’s group used. We’ve never synthesized an entire bacterial genome (that gets expensive!), but we have synthesized complete viral genomes that are fully capable of infection, replication etc (non pathogenic viruses).
This is the company we often use.
Its as easy as pasting the sequence you want synthesized into their webpage, and giving them a credit card number. They will analyze the sequence to make sure you are not trying to create anything nasty, then make it. The fedex it to you in a couple weeks. Most sequences cost about 39 cents a base.
I wish this service was available when I was a grad student. Would have saved me thousands of hours.
I read about the “synthetic” bacterium that Venter created, and got the basic concept, but I had no idea a service like this existed.
Living in the future is awesome.