Name: Artificial Life
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<div class="rich-text">(This video is no longer available for streaming.) Correspondent Robert Krulwich explores the controversial scientific frontier of artificial life: creating new forms of life from scratch. In labs all over the world, serious scientists are venturing where only science fiction films have gone before—reinventing life itself. The report examines different approaches: simplifying existing life, trying to recreate the origins of life on Earth, and devising new recipes unrelated to life as we know it.
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Are scientists on the verge of making living things from little more than dust?

<div class="rich-text">Are scientists on the verge of making living things from little more than dust?</div>

Artificial Life 

Tech & Engineering

<div class="rich-text"><h3>
 Artificial Life
</h3>

 PBS Airdate: October 18, 2005



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : After all, what are living things made of? We are made of chemicals:
carbon, hydrogen—simple chemicals, you could by them at a store. But you
put these chemicals together in just the right way and you get a breathing,
living being.


 Life is not an unfathomable mystery. Scientists say this is a piece of
chemical engineering. This is a beautiful chemical machine. Now, one day, they
say, we're going to build a creature from scratch—simpler than this. But
the surprise is that that day may be getting much, much closer.


 You know those Hollywood movies? The ones where scientists do improbable
things? They mess with life, then they get a little confident...



 FRANKENSTEIN (Movie)
 
 : Now I know what it's like to be God!



 FRANKENSTEIN'S FRIEND (Movie)
 
 : You're crazy.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : But what if I told you that there are dozens
of scientists, right now, trying to do something much like that? I mean,
they're not stealing dead organs in the dark of night or constructing a seven
foot creature with bolts in its neck, but starting with dry, dead dust, they're
working on tiny life forms, racing for the big prize. They want to be the first
to turn non-life into self-sustaining, living creatures.



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	We're going to have laboratory life. This is really
knocking on the door.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : As best we can tell, there hasn't been a
completely new life form for the last three and a half billion years, not since
the first act of creation. But you are about to meet scientists who say we can
do it again.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 (Los Alamos National Laboratory): The steps we
have to take are getting smaller and smaller.



 MARK BEDAU
 
 (Reed College): It's doable and it's relatively cheap.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And what's most amazing, and in some ways a
little frightening, is that some of them say it's not going to be that
hard.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : Compared to, you know, making the bomb or sending
people to the moon, I think it's significantly easier.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Easier to create life from scratch than
making a bomb?



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : Yeah, easier, significantly easier. Yeah.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Why easier? Because, say the scientists who
do this, life has a rough formula, and we know the formula.


 So this is your place?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 (President, DNA 2.0): This is it.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : What's it called?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : This is DNA 2.0. We make DNA.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : You make DNA?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : We make DNA.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : The same DNA that builds living
creatures?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : Exactly, yes.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Exactly? Do you mean exactly?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : I mean exactly.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And if you wanted to order some DNA for say
an experiment, a company like Jeremy Minshull's could custom make it for you,
in other words, kind of like DNA to go. DNA being, of course, the recipe for
living creatures, built from chemical ingredients abbreviated A, C, T and
G.


 So if I'm a creature—let's suppose I'm a very small
creature—I'm not going to be anything immodest like a cat or a mouse, but
I'm just a little, itty bitty thing, and you can spell me CCCTTTGGG. Do you
have all those chemicals here?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : Absolutely. And we can make you.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : A bold statement.


 So, he doesn't mean that literally, but right away I could tell that Jeremy
and I don't look at life the same way. When I look at, let's say jellyfish, I
see a weird, pulsing, hairy creature. When he looks at the same thing—at
least during business hours—he sees a blueprint, a chemical
formula.



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : Those letters carry all the information that makes us.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And while we've known for a while how to read
DNA recipes, even cut and splice—genetic engineering—now, at
companies like Jeremy's, they can write recipes, create genes from scratch that
never existed.


 So, if I call you up on the phone and say, "Can you make me something that
would, in a living creature, make it glow green?" You'd know what I
need?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : Exactly. We would know. We would know just what you
need.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : This, for example, is a bottle of T, standing
for Thymine.



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : Can I have your hand? Please?



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And this is what it looks like. Here we go.
It's just powder.



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : It's just powder.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Is this in any way alive?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : This is in no way alive.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : So, this is just dust?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : Just dust.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Not alive?


 So Jeremy mixes this dust with some liquid chemicals—still not
alive—and hooks them all up to this machine. So now it's a solution in
all these things.


 It's got the As, Cs and Ts in bottles, tucked in here. And you just type in
whatever recipe you want and the machine pumps out the letters of life. So,
it'll go "C and C and C and T and T and T."



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : That's right.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : The machine makes dozens of strands of
letters, and then some other machines mix them all together, and,
automatically, they self-assemble.



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : They self-organize.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : In the right order?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : In the right order.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Jeremy plugs the completed gene into
bacteria, and—look at this—the bacteria glow.



 JEREMY MINSHUL
 
 : Our instructions were followed, and it's making green
glow.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : So for about 900 bucks, starting, literally,
with chemical dust, we have just made, not quite life, but a gene, a gene that
never existed before.


 Then will you mail me the genes?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : That's exactly what we'll do.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Woooshhh. All this is just going around
through the mail all the time?



 JEREMY MINSHULL
 
 : That's right.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : It's funny. You say...this is all new to
me...and if it's that easy to construct individual genes from scratch, some of
these folks say, well, "Why stop there? Why not build all the genes to make up
a creature?" And amazingly, a couple of years ago, scientists created the DNA
for a whole virus.


 They copied the DNA recipe, then got it through the membrane of the cell,
and the cell manufactured a burst of new viruses, just like happens in real
life. So would this count as life?



 FRANCIS COLLINS
 
 (National Human Genome Research Institute): No,
it would not.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : "Sorry," says biologist Francis
Collins.



 FRANCIS COLLINS:
 
 'Cause remember, what you're making in this machine is
not life; you're making DNA. And DNA is just the instruction book. But an
instruction book doesn't actually build anything.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Ah, so it's the living cell that does the
real work here. DNA by itself does not create life.



 FRANCIS COLLINS
 
 : So I would say that was not life.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : So, then, what is life? What exactly do you
need? Well one basic definition says that life requires a bunch of things: a
container, something to live in; the ability to use energy, to grow or change;
the ability to reproduce, to create creatures that look like yourself; and for
some, the ability to evolve.


 But making a creature from scratch that meets all four requirements is
much, much harder than making a gene. In fact, no one has been able to do
it.


 But now, scientists all over the world are working on different parts of
this puzzle. One of them is Dave Deamer who's looking for clues in the distant
past.


 Today, his quest brings him to the remote mountains of northern California,
to a very strange place.



 DAVID DEAMER:
 
 This is Bumpass Hell - we are in hell!



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And Bumpass Hell is on Mount Lassen, an
active volcano.



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	This is one of the few places on the Earth that we think
resembles what the pre-biotic Earth was like: hot, boiling water, mud,
clay...



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : This is the kind of place, Dave thinks, where
life might have emerged the first time around. The question is, "How did that
happen?"



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	One of the great remaining questions of science...nobody
yet knows how life began.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Our best guess is that life at the
beginning—and we're talking three and half billion years ago—must
have been made of ingredients that were either lying around on the early Earth
or brought in from space on meteorites or comets. And the first life must have
been very simple, just a little bubble-like container with a little bit of
chemistry going on inside.


 That's one of Dave's hopes today, that he can use the environment of this
pond to get some primitive chemical changes going. The powder he's got here
contains some basic building blocks that could have existed back then.



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	We're going to get some of this hot water into this little
mixture of organic chemicals. These are biochemicals.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Then he spikes the pool with these basic
ingredients, takes a sample of the mixture...so has he created life?



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	Nothing popped out yet that's wiggling. Ha, ha, ha.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Well, he didn't expect that, but he is hoping
that the chemicals in this pond will be able to build life requirement Number
1, a container. Because Dave has already found that tiny containers, kind of
like primitive cell membranes, can form on their own. He did it in a lab from
chemicals he found on this rock, the famous Murchison meteorite.



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	There's nothing alive in a meteorite, and yet the
components, the organic components of the meteorite have the property of
self-assembly into these microscopic bubble-like structures.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And they did it?



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	And they did it.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : So they can make mini-containers from
scratch.


 Then in Switzerland, they got those containers to grow; at Harvard, they
got them to divide; and RPI in New York got different chemicals to assemble
into a gene-like shape; and at MIT, they got a primitive gene to start to copy
itself.



 DAVID DEAMER
 
 : 	We know how to make things grow. We know how to make
things reproduce. We know how to make things evolve, in a sense, so we can do
all those things.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And since they can do all this stuff, they
say soon they can put it all together and build an entire living
thing—microscopic, yeah, but alive.



 MARK BEDAU
 
 : 	We feel like we are on the verge of making a huge, new
discovery.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : This is coming. There's no way...it's a tidal wave we
can see in the distance, and it's going to come. It's going to hit us. There's
no discussion about that.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : No discussion? But what about the people who
believe that life requires something more than just chemistry? What would you
say to the person who said, "No, you need a kiss from God or a bit of lightning
or something mysterious and magical to go from one state to the other?"



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : If I want to talk about this poetically, I think it is
a little bit magic. But all...doesn't matter what you look at in your life,
there is magic in that.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : But still, when Steen Rasmussen and all the
scientists we talked to look at life up close—right into a
cell—life is not a poem.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : Life is a machine.



 MARK BEDAU
 
 : 	It's essentially a collection of molecules. There's nothing
else that's there.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : It is a molecular machine that does certain things.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And if you buy into the notion that life is
chemistry, rules and structure—if life is a machine—then we can
build it.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : These guys, they organize themselves all by
themselves.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Steen's idea for building life is perhaps the
most radical of all, because it is so extraordinarily simple.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : What we're trying to do is the absolutely minimal form
of life you can imagine. It's a million times smaller than the simplest,
lousiest little organism we know today. So, all the greasy stuff will sort
of...



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : The creature Steen has designed, and is now
trying to build, has no cell membrane, just an oily blob—no DNA, instead
of DNA, a manmade chemical not found in nature.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : And our proto-organism grows. It swells up as it eats
all the food.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : But can you build something so alien from
life as we know it?



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : Do I believe that you can make life that is different
from life as we know it? Oh, absolutely. I do believe that.


 We need this guy to digest his food.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : If Steen can get his newfangled creature,
this homemade alien, to meet life's requirements...



 NEIL deGRASSE TYSON
 
 (American Museum of Natural History): If
someone creates an alien on Earth, if you can do that, there's...now you're
talking. Now, I'm going to say, "I want to bring you on my spaceship, 'cause I
want you to help me find life elsewhere in the cosmos."



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says we've
got no idea if life is even possible without the usual ingredients. But if
Steen engineers a completely different life form...



 NEIL deGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Then, all of a sudden, your cosmic kitchen becomes
this place where you are testing the limits of what life is and what it isn't.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : And if life can be different than it is on
Earth, think of the possibilities: life, say, with no water; life in a cloud,
say the clouds of Jupiter; or any life that we are able to build.



 STEEN RASMUSSEN
 
 : This is a potentially very, very, very powerful
technology. If we understand, if we get the key to life, if we understand and
control the creative forces of nature, that's a big deal.



 ROBERT KRULWICH
 
 : But if and when we begin to make life, the
question is, can we control it? I mean, in so many movies, when they make life,
the experiment gets away from them.



 NEIL deGRASSE TYSON
 
 : My experiment will get away from me because in the
movie, it got away from them? That's not evidence. But in all fairness to the
question, there's no doubt that every advance of human understanding of the
universe, of technology, of our power over nature, there's always sort of the
other side of that sword, because it's a sword of power.


 Taking that literally, do we say to folks who are coming out of the Stone Age
into the Bronze Age, "Don't make the sword, because you can hurt yourself with
the sword. You could cut your finger and that would be bad. Don't make the
sword." But they say, "Oh, but I can use the sword to get food, and I can cut
things, and I can build." If everyone throughout the history of human culture
listened to the person in the robe who said "Don't go there; it is not meant
for you," we would still be living in the cave.
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