What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology - Hardcover

Regis, Ed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374288518 ISBN 13: 9780374288518

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Synopsis

In 1944, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a groundbreaking little book called What Is Life? In fewer than one hundred pages, he argued that life was not a mysterious or inexplicable phenomenon, as many people believed, but a scientific process like any other, ultimately explainable by the laws of physics and chemistry.

 

Today, more than sixty years later, members of a new generation of scientists are attempting to create life from the ground up. Science has moved forward in leaps and bounds since Schrödinger's time, but our understanding of what does and does not constitute life has only grown more complex. An era that has already seen computer chip-implanted human brains, genetically engineered organisms, genetically modified foods, cloned mammals, and brain-dead humans kept "alive" by machines is one that demands fresh thinking about the concept of life.

 

While a segment of our national debate remains stubbornly mired in moral quandaries over abortion, euthanasia, and other "right to life" issues, the science writer Ed Regis demonstrates how science can and does provide us with a detailed understanding of the nature of life. Written in a lively and accessible style, and synthesizing a wide range of contemporary research, What Is Life? is a brief and illuminating contribution to an age-old debate.

About this title

About the Author

Ed Regis, who holds a PhD in philosophy from New York University, is a full-time science writer, contributing to Scientific American, Harper's Magazine, Wired, Discover, and The New York Times, among other periodicals. He is the author of several books, including The Biology of Doom.

Reviews

As scientists come closer to creating artificial life, the very definition of life is ever more elusive. Science writer Regis (The Biology of Doom) tackles this large issue and more in a book that never quite finds its focus. By selecting the same title as Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger's 1945 classic and Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan's 2000 offering, Regis self-consciously situates his book as a response to theirs. He is, however, no more successful than they were in answering the central question, though he proposes cell metabolism as the best definition we currently have. Regis discusses current attempts to use new techniques to create entities that could be considered living, but he fails to tell a compelling story about either the progress being made or the medical implications of these efforts. Instead, he heads off on several well-traveled tangents presenting relatively simple explanations of how we've come to our understanding of DNA, basic metabolic pathways and evolutionary biology. Although he touches on the fact that being able to distinguish animate from inanimate entities is of critical philosophical importance for debates over such issues as abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia, he never does more than scratch the surface of any of these topics. (Apr.)
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To the question posed in the title, science writer Regis provides this answer: an embodied metabolism. The title honors the 1944 science classic by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, of wave/particle duality fame. When Schrödinger posed the question, he meant to set an agenda––DNA had not yet been identified as the genetic carrier molecule. Regis’ purpose in asking it seems motivated by the incipient creation of life from scratch, and, putting aside the ethics and biological danger of this portentous landmark in human history, seeks to furnish informed readers with a framework for deciding for themselves when scientists have crossed the finish line. Setting the tone by profiling a team running the artificial-life race, Regis presents their research program for bringing up baby, then reverts to a historical summary of the revolution in molecular biology. Covering its major discoveries, Regis devotes as much time to metabolism as to the more glamorous DNA story. Venturing that aliveness is more a philosophical than a scientific matter, Regis offers timely preparation for thought about big science headlines to come. --Gilbert Taylor

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 
What Is Life?



One

Birth of a Cell


 


 

MAY 2005. In a new industrial park at Porto Marghera, some four miles across the lagoon from Venice, an American physicist by the name of Norman Packard is staring at the enormous 30-inch-wide display screen of a Macintosh G5 computer. Floating around against a dark background is a dense assortment of red, green, and blue dots.

“Blue is water, the greens are hydrophobic molecules, which means they don’t like water, and the reds are hydrophilic molecules, which do,” Packard says.

The simulation begins with the dots spread out evenly across the screen in a relatively homogeneous mix. But then in the incremental time-steps of the particle dynamics program, a pattern emerges. The greens move toward one another and then converge and clump together, forming a spherical structure. The reds, meanwhile, follow the greens and arrange themselves on the outside of the mass, as if to protect it from intrusion. The result is a vesicle, a tiny bilayered fluid-filled sac. The vesicle has formed itself spontaneously, the result of a self-assembly process driven by Brownian motion (the random thermal movement of molecules in a fluid medium) and by various chemical reactions.

“We believe that this combination of chemical reactions and self-assembly is one of the crucial combinations that we need to understand to make these artificial cells,” Packard says.

Artificial cells? Venice? A city of more than a hundred churches, miles of canals, and innumerable ancient palazzi, all of them suspended in time, a place where nothing fundamentally new has happened for hundreds of years? Somehow the location is strangely fitting. In its heyday, Venice was a world-class power and trading center as well as a realm of considerable intellectual freedom. The city was now and always had been home to a variety of creative spirits: composers, artists, and scientists, including Galileo. And its labyrinthine streets and alleys were bathed in the green waters of the Venetian lagoon—water just coincidentally being the medium in which, according to most theories, earthly life originally began. So why should it not begin again, here?

Norman Packard, for one, finds no incongruity in the prospect. Packard is the chairman, CEO, and scientific head of ProtoLife s.r.l., a Venetian start-up company located in Parco Vega, a technology park the regional government had created on the grounds of an old chemical factory.

“The city of Venice, but even more generally the region of Veneto, wants to diversify its portfolio of activities,” Packard said. “Venice has this very strong component of tourism that dominates its economy in many ways, and so it’s trying to create some economic diversity that can give a certain kind of life to the city, not related to tourism.”

ProtoLife’s business plan is founded on an attempt to start life over, to begin from the beginning. It’s not their intention to redo Genesis, outdo Frankenstein, or to blaze a path of glory through one of the final frontiers of applied science—although, if they’re successful, Packard and his crew will end up doing all those things. The company’s motivation is far more prosaic, practical, and commercial: to create artificial cells. Made from scratch and called “protocells,” they will be programmed to carry out useful tasks such as synthesizing vaccines and drugs, cleaning up toxic waste, scavenging excess CO2 from the atmosphere, and other such miracles, and earning the company a tidy profit in the process.

After watching his simulation run a few more times—“We’ve done between six and seven thousand runs so far,” he says—Packard walks down a polished green marble hallway, turns right, unlocks a door, and enters the company’s lab suite. This is the domain of ProtoLife’s chief chemist, Martin Hanczyc, a postdoc Packard recently hired away from Jack Szostak’s competing artificial cell project at Harvard. In fact, ProtoLife is only one of a half dozen or so scientific efforts bent on creating new life: in addition to the ProtoLife and Harvard projects, there are others at Rockefeller University in New York, the University of Nottingham in England, and the University of Osaka in Japan, among other places. All too obviously, creating life is an undertaking whose time has come.

Hanczyc’s laboratory at ProtoLife boasts a full supply of chemical apparatus: the usual lab glassware, serological pipettes, fume hoods, scales, centrifuges, microscopes, plus heavier machinery. “This is one of our main analytic tools, a combination spectrophotometer and fluorometer,” Packard says of a large piece of equipment. “You find this in practically every chemistry lab in Europe, so we have one too.”

Hanczyc has been synthesizing and studying various types of vesicles, and today Packard wants to show me what they look like. Packard is a big man with shaggy blond hair, glasses, and a courtly manner. He has a slow and deliberate style of speech, which includes a precise, mellifluous Italian, courtesy of his wife, Grazia Peduzzi, who was born in Milan. He squints through a fluorescence microscope, adjusts the focus, and finally, there they are: the real-life correlates of the objects he had been simulating on the computer.

“Somewhat dried up,” he says of the vesicles, which Hanczyc had prepared a while ago.

A vesicle is not a living thing. It’s just a shell, a husk, the merest framework of the full artificial cell that’s supposed to assemble itself on the premises and spring into life at some undefined point in the future. Nevertheless, what we have here on the microscope stage is something passably astonishing, slight and rudimentary though it might appear at first glance. For these filmy minute blobs are the first stirrings of an event that last took place billions of years ago: the genesis of life.


 


 

THE DREAM OF creating life has ancient roots in the human imagination. In Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley completed in 1817 at the age of nineteen, the scientist Victor Frankenstein cobbled together a creature from body parts he’d spirited away in the dead of night from graveyards, dissection rooms, and slaughterhouses. The resulting beast came to life when Dr. Frankenstein, by unspecified means, infused “a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

Serious scientific attempts at infusing a “spark of life” into inanimate flesh go back at least to Luigi Galvani’s discovery in 1771 that by applying electrical currents to a dissected frog’s legs he could cause them to twitch as if alive. A hundred years later, in 1871, Darwin spoke of life as possibly having arisen “in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, &c., present.”

As if following Darwin’s recipe, when twentieth-century scientists approached the problem of understanding how life originally arose on earth, they attempted to re-create what they thought were the original prebiotic conditions. The canonical effort, now a cliché of twentieth-century science history, was the 1952 “Urey/Miller experiment,” in which the chemists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller put ammonia, hydrogen, and methane inside a closed flask, circulated steam through this “atmosphere,” and added bolts of “lightning” in the form of periodic electrical sparks. All they got for their trouble were some amino acids (building blocks of proteins) that were not in the mixture to begin with. The Urey/Miller experiment was once considered a very big deal, but it isn’t by some of the protocell project’s scientists: “We are not searching in the black and hoping that something happens,” says the protocell researcher Uwe Tangen. “We’re really trying to engineer these things.”

Attempting to build an artificial cell is hardly a new idea in biology, but the specific protocell design Packard and Hanczyc are working on originated with Packard’s longtime friend, the Los Alamos physicist Steen Rasmussen. Even as a boy in Denmark, Rasmussen liked to grapple with the big questions. He was by nature of a metaphysical turn of mind, and while still a kid he discussed subjects of cosmic import with his father, who was a bricklayer. Did the universe have a beginning—or an end? Where did it come from? Where was it going?

Later, in the 1980s, Rasmussen, together with Chris Langton, Norman Packard, and some others, became one of the founding fathers of the artificial life (ALife) movement. Launched at a Los Alamos workshop in 1987, artificial life was an attempt first to simulate and then actually to create a new life-form. Supposedly there was to be “soft,” “wet,” and “hard” artificial life, existing in the form of software, wet chemistry, and robotics, but the reality of the situation turned out to be quite different. “Most of the activities in the artificial life community have been with simulations,” Rasmussen admits.

For a long time, that was true even of Rasmussen himself, who over the years had run countless computer simulations of various life-forms, modeling their possible self-assembly routes, evolutionary development pathways, and so on. But his abiding passion had always been to understand what life was and how it arose. At length he decided that the best way to understand life was to make some of it himself, ab initio.

In truth, he became obsessed with the idea. Although he lived in an adobe-style house surrounded by a number of natural life-forms, including his wife, Jenny, and three kids—no...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374288518
• ISBN 13: 9780374288518
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208