Newsgroup: it.cultura.religioni.cristiani
Titolo: il mondo che sta per venire...

A noi vecchi sembra che il mondo negli ultimi cent'anni
 sia cosi' cambiato da rendere i futuri cambiamenti
possibili limitati e marginali.
NON e' COSI'.
- Cellule staminali
- nuovi farmaci 'genetici' mirati sulle singoli particolari funzioni,
  frutto della ricostruzione del DNA
- il quasi completo dominio delle funzioni cerebrali e delle molecole
   connesse ((fino alla ricostruzione di I.A.))
- 
- la comunicazione globale mettendo direttamente in rete gli  
    individui (prospettive di Internet, ad 
es.ma
 anche dei PC..)
- ma soprattutto le cosidette NANOTECNOLOGIE 
       (vista la pubblicita H&P?)
cambieranno anzi rivoluzioneranno la nostra, forse e' meglio
scrivere la VOSTRA vita.
 Auguri.
Sarebbe interessante farsi qualche domanda su come cambiera' l'<uomo>
in qs, mutate condizioni... anche x i riflussi economici...
ciao
pb

    connesse ((fino alla ricostruzione di I.A.))
Queste cose sono state scritte meglio su questo NG da altri (non ricordo).
Anzi si era discusso della futura immortalità dell'uomo.
Tu dove eri?
Stefania

Tu dove eri?
a postare un msg in cui si ipotizziva un cervello collegato in
virtuale in aeternum.. tu dove eri se non lo hai letto?
pit BUM

A proposito di nanotecnologie...
Ricercatori della Ludwig Maximillian University in Germania
hanno escogitato un sistema a base di DNA per produrre
qualsivoglia proteina. Attese applicazioni nel giro di pochi anni.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/rnb_032404.asp
a noi in Italia niente teknologie, ci e' rimasto il nano.
pit BUM

roba da avere le vertigini(by Sun sentinel):
------------------------------------------------
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.
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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."
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e i risvolti morali??