Ms. DNA

I've never used enzymes to quantify proteins. Instead I use colormetric assays that use stains such as Bradford Reagent or the BCA protein assay.

I found this article on CNN's website. Basically, it says that while the number of jobs requiring scientific skills increases, the number of American students who major in science or engineering lags behind other nations. (Finland has the highest proportion of scientists.) Although the U.S. depends on foreign-born scientists, many of them have problems with immigration or are sought by their own countries. Here's the full story: http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/05/06/science.education.ap/index.html

I read a science fiction story using this "slow glass" a couple of months ago; maybe later when I have more time I can post the URL.

Saliva isn't pure amylase; there are other enzymes and compounds in it. For more than you ever wanted to know about saliva, try this link: http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/digestion/pregastric/salivary.html The enzyme in the bottle most likely doesn't come from saliva; a lot of commerical enzymes are made from microorganisms specifically grown to produce enzyme. Also, if you use the bottled enzyme, you'll know what the activity level is. It's possible that the level of amlyase in saliva could vary from person to person or in different conditions.

There was a special traveling exhibit on Einstein at the Field Museum in Chicago not too long ago. It featured some of his personal belongs and had demonstrations about certain parts of his theories -- including time dilation, if I recall correctly. Unfortunately, I don't know where that exhibit is right now.

I think our behavior and enviroment change faster than evolution can keep up. For instance, we developed a taste for sweet foods when they were relatively rare in the enviromnet, but we sought them out because they were a good source of energy. Today sugary foods are all over the place, to the point where it's easy to become overweight or develop other health issues. It would actually be better for us if we didn't crave sweets so much, but humanity's sweet tooth hasn't gone away. And unless poor eating habits suddenly create such big health problems that we die young or have trouble reproducing, I doubt we'll evolve a genetic solution. So we'll have to rely on behavioral solutions for the problems our behavior gets us into.

To get back to fingerprints and genetics, I searched on Google and found this link, which explains how fingerprints form. http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/article.jsp?id=lw474

I found an online tutorial that might help here: http://www.biology.arizona.edu/cell_bio/tutorials/meiosis/main.html Meiosis occurs before fertilization takes place. Without meiosis, you wouldn't have sperm or eggs. Crossing over occurs between the maternal and paternal chromosomes during the first part of meiosis; it increases the different types of gametes you can produce. For this exercise, let's assume the genes for hair color and eye color are on the same chromosome. (I think they are, but I'm not completely sure.) Let's also assume I inherited gene for blond hair and blue eyes from my mother and black hair and brown eyes from my father. Without crossing over, my children would inheirit either blue eyes/blond hair or brown eyes/black hair. But with crossing over, you have more possibilities: the original two, plus blue eyes/black hair and brown eyes/blonde hair. That's what they mean by increasing genetic diversity. Hope this helps. (Edited to provide further explanation.)

Well, according to the website below, everyone is a 40th cousin. It also has some interesting speculations on who our common ancestors were. http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~humphrys/FamTree/Royal/ca.html See you at the family reunion.

Actually, admiral, I'm in my 30s--I turn 34 this Wednesday. Hopefully I'm not such an old dog that I can't learn new tricks. I'm personally not a religious person, but I'm not sure what the statistics are regarding religon in my age group.

(I'm putting this topic in the Biology forum since I don't have a direct link to a news story and in case the conversation turns general.) There was a news report on ABC tonight that researchers in Japan have created a mouse with two mothers. The report didn't go into detail about how this was done, but it did say that the DNA from one mother was treated to make it look like a male's. (They'd have to do this because genes are expressed differently depending on which parent they come from.) The mouse is now a healthy adult and has had babies "the old-fashioned" way. Reasearchers say this technique can be used to create stem cells for research. So, what do people think about this? Do you think this technique will ever be used in humans for reproduction? I personally doubt it would replace sex entirely, although female couples might want to reproduce this way. It's a thought-provoking idea, though.

Well, I just tried deleting the cookies on my work computer, and I was able to log out and back in. Now I need to try it at home. Thanks, blike and Sayonara!

Yes, DNA is a nucleic acid, though it may have proteins associated with it.

Humm, will I get in trouble if I respond to this with LOL? I don't mind abbreviations like LOL or IIRC in an informal setting like chat or e-mail, but I wouldn't use them in a report or essay. (I might use them in fiction, but only if it was appropriate for the story.) Perhaps part of the problem with students using Internet slang in papers is that they don't realize they need to be more formal in certain situations. Informality is a hard habit to break sometimes.

Internet Explorer, Version 6.028.

My boyfriend (Photovet 97) is over here and wanted to post something, but we weren't able to log out my account. We hit the "Log Out" link at the top of the page and hit "OK" when the dialogue box shows up. It then takes us to a "All Cookies Cleared" page, but when we go back to the main page, I'm still logged in. Any idea what's going on?

Hello everyone, This is Photovet97 on my girlfriends computer. I couldn't get the article directly from the Tribune since they placed it in their archive and will charge a fee for getting the full text. Go figure. So, I copied it from another website after doing the google. Science on verge of new `Creation' Labs say they have nearly all the tools to make artificial life By Ronald Kotulak Tribune science reporter Posted March 28 2004 More than 3.5 billion years after nature transformed non-living matter into living things, populating Earth with a cornucopia of animals and plants, scientists say they are finally ready to try their hand at creating life. If they succeed, humanity will enter a new age of "living technology," where harnessing the power of life to spontaneously adapt to complex situations could solve problems that now defy modern engineering. Scientists eagerly talk of a new world of ultra-small living machines, where marvelously made-to-order cells heal the body, clean up pollutants, transform electronics and communication, and much more. The researchers say it may be possible to make sweaters that mend themselves. Or computers that fix their own glitches. Though some experts see this new technology as providing unlimited benefits, others worry about the moral appropriateness of human-made life and the introduction of new species with the potential to evolve into creatures that could run amok. "It's certainly true that we are tinkering with something very powerful here," said artificial-life researcher Steen Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. "But there's no difference between what we do here and what humans have always done when we invented fire, transistors and ways to split the atom," he said. "The more powerful technology you unleash, the more careful you have to be." Such concern is escalating as more than 100 laboratories study processes involved in the creation of life, and scientists say for the first time that they have just about all the pieces they need to begin making inanimate chemicals come alive. Unlike any other technology invented by humans, creating artificial life will be as jarring to our concepts of ourselves as discovering living creatures on other planets in the universe would be. It also would bring into sharper focus the age-old questions of "What is life?" and "Where do we come from?" "The ability to make new forms of life from scratch--molecular living systems from chemicals we get from a chemical supply store--is going to have a profound impact on society, much of it positive, but some of it potentially negative," said Mark Bedau, professor of philosophy and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Ore., and editor-in-chief of the Artificial Life Journal. "Aside from the vast scientific insights that will come, there will be vast commercial and economic benefits, so much so that it's hard to contemplate in concrete detail what many of them will be," he said. But the first artificial life also is likely to shock people's religious and cultural belief systems. "People from many different backgrounds have special views about what life is: how it originates, the special sanctity it has, the special dignity it deserves," Bedau said. "The ability to make new forms of life will perturb all of that. We need to think through the implications and how we are going to react to them." `Biology revolution' Still, artificial life now seems so attainable that the number of U.S. labs working in the field jumped from about 10 four decades ago to more than 100 today. Spearheading the drive is the European Union's Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution project, recently established with a grant of about $9 million. This month PACE is scheduled to open the first institution devoted exclusively to creating artificial life, called the European Center for Living Technology, in Venice, staffed by European and U.S. researchers. "It's a synthetic biology revolution," said John McCaskill, professor of theoretical biochemistry at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany, who is overseeing the European Union's artificial life program. "We obviously don't want to be too polemic about how rapidly this is going to transform society," he said. "But I think that we are seeing a new feature of science and technology where systems are tonomously adaptive and that this is a significant component of the design process." Scientists are trying to unravel the grand mystery of how life originated on Earth, and possibly Mars and other places in the universe. How is it that when atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen are organized in the right way, for example, they make a carrot? Arranging far more atoms in a different way produces a human being. Life is generally not thought of as being mechanical. But a cell basically is a miniature machine in which non-living atoms are constantly being rearranged to make the moving parts that imbue it with life. The cell, the basic unit of all living things, becomes much more than all of its parts. New properties emerge that give a cell the power to repair itself, reproduce and adapt to changing environments. A key element of all living systems is the ability to evolve through natural selection. Things that are successful survive, while those that fail to adapt die off. The idea is to incorporate this evolutionary design process into technology that people can use, making things that are complicated and well-adapted without having to figure out in advance all the problems that could arise. "Our technology right now is facing a complexity crisis. We need to make things that are more complicated if we want to have new kinds of functionality," Bedau said. "We want to have better telephone switching networks, better computers, better spacecraft, but we don't know how to do it." "If we could make life, we would have a new insight into how to make things more complicated," he said. "We could apply these principles in other areas. Life is very, very complicated, but it also repairs itself, it organizes itself and it adapts spontaneously to changes. It would be nice to have a space shuttle that can do those things or a telephone switching network that can grow and adapt in an organic way." It is a dream long pursued by scientists who now believe that it may be possible to create the first artificial unit of life in the next 5 to 10 years. "We've been saying that for the last 50 years," said David W. Deamer, a pioneering professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "What makes it different now is that we have a critical mass of people interested in the field and some recent breakthrough discoveries." Natural safeguards >From Deamer's point of view, the risk that artificially created life could get out of hand is "infinitesimally small." "There's nothing we could make that could compete with the predators that are out there and have had 3 billion years to evolve," he said. "Bacteria eat anything. They eat jet fuel, oil deposits, chlorinated hydrocarbons, anything. They will eat anything that we put out there to compete with them." Another safeguard scientists are designing to provide total control over artificial cells is to make their lives dependent on chemicals that do not exist in the environment. Withdrawing the critical chemicals would result in the death of the cells, particularly if they should escape into the environment. What makes life possible, scientists believe, is the natural tendency of atoms to assemble into molecules, and for molecules to assemble into increasingly complicated structures. All of the basic elements of life--the amino acids that make proteins and the nucleotides that make DNA and its sidekick RNA--have been produced in the laboratory from chemicals thought to have been present on primitive Earth: hydrogen, methane, ammonia, formaldehyde, cyanide, thiols and hydrosulfide. Some of these elements are so easy to self-assemble that amino acids are found on meteorites originating at the beginning of the solar system. The Murchison meteorite, for example, contains a wide variety of chemicals, including simple amino acids and fats called lipids. When put in water, lipids spontaneously form bubble-shaped membranes that resemble cells. Earth coalesced 4.5 billion years ago during the formation of the solar system, and it was too hot for life for several hundred million years. But it didn't take long after the Earth cooled for life to appear. Scientists estimate that fossils of primitive organisms appeared 3.8 billion years ago. Researchers argue over the definition of life, but they generally agree that it must have three elements: a container, such as the membrane wall of a cell; metabolism, the ability to convert basic nutrients into a cell's working parts; and genes, chemical instructions for building a cell that can be passed on to progeny and change as conditions change. Each of these critical elements has now been achieved in the laboratory, albeit in rudimentary form, and scientists say they are ready to try to put them all together in one working unit. "We have quite a bit of knowledge about how these different systems work independently," said microbiologist Martin Hanczyc of Massachusetts General Hospital. "We are at a point where we can start taking these things into the laboratory and do experiments. "Whether we'll be able to synthesize a living cell in the near future is a big question. But we can start exploring that possibility with what we have available now," said Hanczyc, who along with Harvard's Jack Szostak is able to make artificial cellular membranes grow and divide. One of the tricks they learned is how to use the remarkable properties of clay, thought to have been abundant on the early Earth. Clay has natural catalytic properties--it speeds up the assembly of lipid membranes a hundredfold, for example, and also hastens the assembly of genetic material called ribonucleic acid. The two researchers' findings indicate that critical chemicals can spontaneously be brought together to form membranes and genes that are essential for life. They have succeeded in creating cell-like containers that have incorporated laboratory-made RNA. A genetic riddle How the first genes got together is a big mystery. Many scientists believe that RNA may have preceded DNA because it can carry genetic instructions and, unlike DNA, make copies of itself. Today DNA preserves the chemical instructions for making and maintaining an organism, while RNA mostly translates those instructions into proteins. DNA and RNA are nearly identical in structure. David Bartel of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is trying to make RNA that can fully reproduce itself. So far he has gotten compounds to assemble into small RNA sequences that can make partial copies of themselves. Bartel calls it test tube evolution. More than 1,000 trillion random RNAs are squirted into a test tube and allowed to assemble into millions of different sequences. A few of those sequences acquired the ability to make copies of RNA sequences, a fledgling step toward artificial life that can reproduce itself and evolve. Key ingredient Rasmussen of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Liaohai Chen of Argonne National Laboratory believe they have a good chance of making an artificial cell by using a slightly different version of DNA called polypeptide nucleic acid. Unlimited variations of PNA can easily be made. They love to stick to the surface of membranes where they can suck up nutrients and hopefully churn out all kinds of novel chemicals, including more cell membrane lipids. "We have all the pieces, and we have demonstrated that our metabolism can produce the container molecules," Chen said. The protocells that assemble are 10 million times smaller than a bacterium, he said. The idea is to get all the parts working together so that the artificial cells would not only make daughter cells, but would also be able to manufacture custom-made chemicals now beyond the reach of engineers, such as self-repairing materials. "Once we have self-reproducing entities that can be programmed, you can do all kinds of useful things," Rasmussen said. "You don't need to build the useful molecules--you can actually have them self-reproduce--you can grow them." Physicist Norman Packard, who established the first company, ProtoLife, to capitalize on the new field of living technology, thinks of artificial cells as tiny machines that can be programmed to clean out arteries, deliver drugs to specific sites in the body and perform other jobs with great precision. "The goal of the company is to realize the vision of producing living artificial cells, and also producing other forms of living chemistry, and then programming them to do useful chemical applications," he said. "The range of useful chemical functions we ultimately envision is vast."

I found this article on CNN's website. It didn't seem "newsy" enough for the news forum, so I thought I'd post it here. It talks about some of the possibilites of nanotechnology, such as detecting cancers, and some of the surprising discoveries scientists have made, such as that atoms make noise when they're moved. There are also some pictures, including a cool one of electrons interacting. Here's the link: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/04/15/nanotech.ideas/index.html

I think it's a good idea too, although I'm not sure what a "revision program" is. Is it a British term?

Aren't ninjas too big to be affected by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

Hello Galadriel, Welcome to the forums. I'm a science fiction writer too, though I haven't sold anything yet. I also work with proteins and enzymes as part of my day job. Your idea is very interesting, as I'm developing a colony world where the colonists have to cope with an alien biochemistry. To answer your question, perhaps the protein might have a different type of amino acid that our enzymes don't recoginize, or it may have some bonds that our enyzmes can't break. And I think YT has a good point about pre-treating the food instead of giving the enzyme to people; there's be less chance of the enzyme causing side effects. Besides, you would also have to develop an enzyme that can not only break down this protein but work in a human's digestive system at the right pH and temperature, and it might be hard getting all of those properties in oneenzyme. Is there only a single indigestible protein in the vegetation, or are all of them indigestible? If it's only one protein, perhaps the colonists can extract it out before eating the food.

OK, I hope this works.... This is me with my boyfriend.

Humm, if the microwave's only effect on the food is heating it, perhaps it simply didn't get hot enough in the microwave to kill the ant. The microwave walls don't get hot, do they? Perhaps the ant wasn't on the plate the entire time you were cooking your meal. It might have been in a corner of a microwave initially and then crawled onto the plate when it smelled the food. Since the topic is about biological life forms in general, I'd like to pose another question. Every so often, I microwave my damp kitchen sponge for a couple of minutes to kill any bacteria living in it. I assume steam would kill the bacteria, just like in an autoclave. But is a couple of minutes enough, or would I have to nuke the sponge for a longer time?

I agree with Glider. My understanding of intelligence has always been that it's a mix of genes and environment. Genes may set the potential, but the environment determines whether or not that potential is realized. I would rather see more done to give each child the chance to make the most of his or her genes instead of trying to give each child identical genes. Besides, genes that may be maladaptive in one set of circumstances may be more useful in another situation, so I'm leery of any proposal to reduce genetic diversity.