Originally posted by weaselsan
Creating life is impossible not a technical challenge...Creating good tasting American beer is a technical challenge.
With science and technology doubling roughly every eighteen months, one must be very careful these days when one uses the term ‘impossible.’
All life on earth that we know of is based on DNA. DNA is composed of four non-living, organic molecules. We can build these molecules from scratch, and string them together to form a genome. If that genome we build is a copy of a virus, say, phi X, and if it infects cells and reproduces exactly like the original phi X, then we have created a live virus.
Phi X only has 5,000 base pairs in it’s genome. Humans have 3,000,000,000 so it’s going to take awhile before we start cranking out Frankenstein.