The concept of artificial life is actually very different, and different fields will have their own understanding. People who truly expound the concept of "artificial life" scientifically and try to put it into practice are actually the "original origin" of the computer field - von Neumann (von Neumann).
von Neumann believes that the most important feature of the life system is the self-replication of life. For this reason, in the 1950s, he and Stanislaw Ulam jointly defined the concept of cellular automata . Subsequently, more and more interpretations of artificial life have emerged in the field of computers: from simple functions to "self-replication", to complex robots, and artificial intelligence AlphaGo, which can now defeat humans in Go.
mentions that "creating life" in biology is inseparable from synthetic biology (Synthetic biology), a discipline that has flourished since the 21st century. As the name suggests, synthetic biology is to use synthetic methods to create new biological information, such as genetic engineering, synthetic proteins, synthetic biological drugs, and of course, synthetic life. In 2010, a team led by Craig Venter announced that they had created the world's first artificially synthesized life structure.
Vincent is a veritable "scientific madman". Artificial life is just one of his many achievements | Source: TED They used chemical synthesis methods to synthesize the modified DNA of the "Mycoplasma mycoides", which contains 901 genes, antibiotic gene and some artificial DNA information that has no actual function, and then import it into the receptor bacteria (Mycoplasma goat). After a period of growth and division, normal cells and cells containing only artificial genomes will appear. Then, by killing normal cells with the help of antibiotics, they can screen out "artificial life".
Since the birth of the world's first cloned animal, humans have made major breakthroughs in gene editing . As time goes by, GMO technology becomes more and more mature, and we can see many GMO products on the market. Of course, GM crops have always been a topic of public debate, because there are still many problems in GM technology . If we don’t talk about GM crops, GM technology has achieved good results in other fields. Let's take a look at some typical cases.
First of all, it is the first cloned sheep on earth, - Doria. Its birth marks a breakthrough in human cloning. Although many people have heard of the name Dolly the sheep, they don’t know how it came about. This is the result of a great experiment by a British biologist in 1996. It is understood that biologists inject the nucleus of mature cells into egg cells. In fact, before Dolly, scientists had cloned frogs, cows and other animals, but the DNA 2 of these cloned animals comes from the embryo, while Dolly's DNA comes from the somatic cells, which is an unprecedented technological breakthrough.
Unfortunately, Dolly didn't live long after she died of lung disease. Now, Dorry Sheep, let's talk about another animal that combines with sheep, that is Spider Sheep . Spider-sheep is not a hybrid product of sheep and spider-like hybrids, but the characteristics of spider transfer to goats, a phenomenon that has occurred since 2012. Scientists have genetically engineered the goats so that the milk they produce can produce a protein , a spider silk-specific one.
To solve this problem, scientists added a human gene to the mice so that the mice can secrete lactoferritin. This technology is still in the experimental stage and is not ready to be put into practical applications. Even so, it will be difficult to keep up with global demand. So scientists are looking for other animals that can do the job, with goats and cows being current candidates. There are countless examples of this, some pleasant and some worrying because they violate human moral codes.
Is it to replace humans? Seeing this, I wonder if you were shocked by the artificial life created by biologists? Or maybe you are thinking, are there complex ethical issues behind this? Will artificial life replace humans in the future?
However, we might as well think about this issue from a different perspective: I believe that in addition to satisfying the exploration of life, researchers have other considerations for developing such artificial life.
For example, when we mentioned the smallest cell "Cynthia" created by synthetic biology, researchers modeled and deduced on this relatively simple cell model, and gained a deeper understanding of the biological metabolic process in the cells; further analysis of the smallest cell, such as the "biobot" constructed using Xenopus embryos and computational modeling, scientists are trying to use its biological characteristics and efficient self-repair capabilities to help drug transportation or internal and surgical operations; and it sounds like the intelligent "brain in a dish" DishBrain system has begun to produce a breakthrough attempt for computer chips - if tens of billions of neurons can be effectively connected and operated, the computing efficiency behind it will be far greater than that of existing computer systems. Looking at these studies again, is artificial life not that terrifying?
