A recent article on BBC News examines developments in “synthetic biology”, where scientists are working to redesign biological organisms from scratch. They have managed to create small “biological factories” which, while not living, are capable of producing proteins. So far all this work is simply rearranging existing biological material, which, while certainly interesting, doesn’t demonstrate anything other than that life comes from life.
They have also assembled viruses using off-the-shelf chemicals. A virus is not a living entity in itself, but scientists hope that such investigation will lead them further down the track to discovering how life comes about from chemicals. Unfortunately once they get there they’ll find out once again that life comes from life because it took the intervention of the scientists to make the chemicals “come to life”. And just where did the chemicals come from anyway?
